Shred Right’s Cybersecurity
It’s difficult to go one day without hearing of cyberattack on a business or that a company has had a data breach. Because of this, it’s easy to feel a general lack of security when trying to decide what companies to work with and attempting to control who you give your information to.
Security is something we take seriously at Shred Right. It’s part of our job: helping our clients securely shred documents containing private information and spread education on how to protect your identity online and off. We aim to provide our clients with a sense of security regarding their personal information. When clients partner with us, they can be assured that we utilize every tool at our disposal to safeguard their information.
To align with this mission, we’ve recently updated some of Shred Right’s own security procedures and enlisted state-of-the-art vendors to help us stay cybersecure.
Our Comprehensive Five-Step Cybersecurity Approach
Email filtering
Every piece of mail sent to a Shred Right email address is first filtered by an outside firm, before it even reaches our inboxes. Once the email is in the clear, it’s presented to us. Each day, every Shred Right employee receive a daily listing of any emails that the spam filter caught. In addition to inbound filtering, we also do outbound filtering. Every email we send is put through the same filters to make sure none of our contacts receive any spam or virus that somehow attached to our messages.
Virus protection
All devices used by Shred Right are equipped with virus protection software. Many times, if a virus does get through, it will attempt download and install a piece of software on the device. To combat this, we have settings inside each of our computers that gives the user a warning about any software being downloaded. The user is given an option to approve the download or deny it. We train our employees to deny the downloads of any software they are not intentionally downloading. And if they do have a new program to download, they must receive a special password from administration in order to install it. This way we have multiple people checking to ensure the programs on our computers are clear of any viruses.
Firewall protection and monitoring
We have a firewall constantly monitoring both our network activity inside the company and our network activity inside each computer to the outside world. In addition to having a firewall in place, we also have an outside vendor who monitors it daily. They get alerts of any suspicious activity and they will give us a call to let us know what’s going on. Or, in some cases, they will shut down our system temporarily and then notify us while they work on getting it back up and running securely.
Hourly system backups
We do very frequent— often hourly— backups of all of our data. This way, if anything were to get corrupted inside our system, we can address the problem and then quickly get back up and running.
Employee training
Through our employee handbooks and in-person training we teach our employees to recognize viruses, spam emails and unsecure programs so they can either address these issues themselves (denying access, deleting the email, reporting the spam) or alert our vendors of them.
Shred Right’s NAID certification
Another big piece of Shred Right’s secure process is our AAA NAID certification. NAID stands for National Association of Information Destruction. This association was developed by information security professionals and founded on the principle of certification.
A NAID certification is very different from being a NAID member. NAID members pay to be on the member list while NAID certified companies are required to meet certain standards for their trucks, machines, processes and facilities. As a NAID certified company, we are audited annually as well as subject to surprise audits to ensure we are up to NAID certification.
It’s important to use a NAID-certified vendor to make sure your materials are handled with top security. You can learn more about the certification process and verify whether the vendors you use or are considering using are certified on their website.
Through these processes and certifications, we’re doing our due diligence to protect against cyberattacks and breaches, ensuring the information we are trusted with stays safe and secure. As new technologies develop, we pledge to continue updating and developing these processes. When working with Shred Right, you can trust your data is safe.