The Cyber Defense eMagazine November Edition for 2023

Your employees are putting your organisation at considerable danger of security breaches and data
breaches if they use WhatsApp for work-related communications on their personal or corporate mobile
devices. Employees continue to use WhatsApp for business interactions every day despite the numerous
legal, security, moral, and financial hazards that come with it.
How did WhatsApp become the preferred tool for businesses?
Although the usage of illicit communications predates COVID, the pandemic increased the practice as
the boundaries between personal and professional lives blurred. This trend has continued as remote and
hybrid working has carried on in a post COVID era. During the pandemic and after, organisations put a
focus on productivity rather than security and in some cases, compliance. It meant that when lockdown
hit, professionals operated within a home environment with no monitoring as there would be in an office.
Therefore, if employees are using unauthorised apps for work communications, organisations need to
consider data governance risks that could occur. There is a higher level of control if people use an
authorised application to communicate, such as establishing retention periods to protect the users holding
sensitive information for an extended period, and compliance configurations.
Any organisation that uses consumer messaging platforms for business communication runs the risk of
having confidential information stored and published without restriction if personal and business data are
combined. Organisations have zero control over private communications, which poses a significant
security and compliance risk.
It is proving costly to some of the world’s largest organisations
While WhatsApp could be deemed to be a practical tool for companies to communicate with customers
or colleagues, some of the biggest financial institutions in the world have found themselves feeling the
significant impact of why you should not be using WhatsApp, Signal and other systems for business
communications.
Last year, more than a dozen powerful banks, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, paid fines
totaling more than $2 billion (£1.6 billion) for failing to keep an eye on messages exchanged through non
compliant consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp. In recent news you may have also seen the Security
and Exchange Commission (SEC) has just levied eye-watering fines on some of the largest FIs in the
world, totaling $549 million for the same reason as well as using Signal, another consumer messaging
system which provides no control to the organisation.
Consumer messaging systems are a real threat to all organisations. Whether it’s client communications
where legal or financial advice is being provided or if employees are conversing with one another on
unsecure messaging apps and their conversations occasionally touch on work-related issues, then those
conversations would be governed by the data protection law. However the use of WhatsApp, Signal and
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