Today I am interviewing the Director of Customer Data Security at Elavon Candice Pressinger who leads on the delivery of Elavon's data security products, services, and consulting solutions helping protect businesses from payments fraud, data breaches, and other security threats. In this article, Candice talks about why you need to protect yourself and especially with the Covid-19 Pandemic video conferencing has grown in popularity. She also showed how 9 million credentials had been exposed by breaches by cybercriminals by just one data security firm. 2021 had also had a record number of data breaches of 1,862 and costs of 4.24 million dollars

Candice states in times of self-isolation and when we had to social distance and work from home it was very important for me to stay connected with my work colleagues and communicate with business partners, suppliers, and customers. Video conferencing allowed me to hand over presenter control to attendees and transmit documents and links. They could even screenshot and record the calls. Candice mentioned the amazing uses of these functions however in the wrong hands like with an uninvited guest important data could be at risk and a lot could go wrong. Candice says there are security considerations that need to be thought of in mind when selecting the solutions when setting up your video conferences

The first security consideration is Selecting a video conferencing tool and making sure each person in the business is able to set up and schedule conference calls and that they have their own login for the web conference solution. Candice also recommended selecting a web conference solution that strongly encrypts all voice and video conversations, as well as any file transfers, chats, or messages between attendees

Secondly when setting up meetings avoid using a personal meeting ID and instead schedule each call in advance so that it has its own unique meeting ID which stops unfamiliar people from joining the call. Avoid publishing joining details of your meetings publicly on a website or social media as this could lead to conference hijacking. 

There are also settings during the video conference meetings such as Asking for permission to record. Another great feature is locking the call which stops people from joining and you can do this after all of your expected attendees have joined to make sure no one else joins. When you are setting up the meeting you can increase the security by having a password, muting all participants upon entry to the call, and having participant arrival and departure notifications

In the interview with Candice Pressinger, we discussed great tricks to stop cybercrime and to help protect your details in a world where computers are used more and we have to stay safe with our information. Candice Pressinger had other great tips and information regarding Payment Security and there is a podcast you can listen to with the link below about her company and how they fight cybercrime

https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/inspiring-women-in-payments-a-podcast-featuring-candice-pressinger