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Des Moines County, Iowa, Discusses Data Protection

Des Moines County works with Carosh Compliance, an Indiana-based company with an office in Iowa City, to train county employees on how to handle sensitive data in an effort to help decrease the risk of a data breach.

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(TNS) — In the digital age, data breaches top news headlines, and these breaches can come from anywhere — even from local government entities.

Des Moines County works with Carosh Compliance, an Indiana-based company with an office in Iowa City, to train county employees on how to handle sensitive data in an effort to help decrease the risk of a data breach.

"Ninety-nine percent of data breaches are caused by lack of training," Roger Shindell, president and CEO of Carosh, explained Tuesday during a board of supervisors meeting in Burlington.

Nearly every county official either works with, or has the potential to work with, material that is either highly personal, such as social security numbers, or protected by the Health Insurance Portability Protection Act.

Data breaches can come in many forms and can be quite costly. Shindell said often after a data breach, entities are required to pay for credit monitoring for a specific length of time to protect those affected. According to Shindell, the average data breach affects about 3,500 people, so even a small mistake can be quite costly.

One example Shindell gave of a local government data breach was when confidential files were dumped into a dumpster instead of being shredded. The entity was not made aware of the mistake until the dumpster had been emptied. There would be no way of knowing whether the data actually fell into the wrong hands, but the entity had to pay for the breach nonetheless.

This is where Carosh steps in. Carosh provides trainings that remind county employees of what their responsibilities are in handling sensitive information and how to handle and safely dispose of that information.

As for getting county employees to actually do their training, the county is working on that. According to numbers presented at the supervisor's meeting, less than one-fourth of county employees have completed their trainings.

"We like to see about 80% completion," Shindell explained.

According to department heads in the meeting, the trainings were difficult for county employees to complete, as clicking next instead of submitting after questions would register a training as incomplete. Other employees were having a difficult time logging into the system to take their required training sessions.

In the end, the supervisors agreed to work on a solution allowing some employees to attend training in person, eliminating the confusion, while others will be allowed to take the training virtually. The hope is the flexible options will encourage a higher completion rate.

©2020 The Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.