Secure translation. Is my data safe?

Cybersecurity has become a priority for organizations of every size. According to Forbes, 94% of organizations have experienced security incidents, while the number of reported data breaches has increased by 72% over the past 20 years.

Translation and localization workflows are no exception. Software, legal, medical, financial, and product content often contains confidential information that should be protected throughout the translation process. Even the exposure of non-public product information, unreleased features, or customer data can affect compliance, customer trust, and business reputation.

This article explains the most common cybersecurity risks in translation workflows, practical measures to reduce those risks, and how a translation management system can help companies protect multilingual content.

Types of cyberattacks

To comprehensively overview this topic, defining the types of cyberattacks is essential. They can be split into 2 groups:

• Insider threats

• Outsider threats

Insider threats

These dangers involve employees or other individuals within an organization. It can be as misuse of the access to steal, leak, or destroy sensitive data as negligent. If malicious activities are less controlled (you should have an NDA) and you can’t prevent this part 100%, the company can prevent carelessness or low internet literacy.

So, the insider threats include:

• Phishing is one of the most common types of cybercrime. Almost half of all emails sent in 2022 (48%) were spam, and Google blocks around 100 million phishing emails daily! Just imagine this figure. Phishing is targeted mainly at the human factor — clicking on links, downloading malware, or sharing sensitive data such as access. The employee can get an email from the fake admin requesting urgent action like confirming personal data, changing passwords, etc. As a result, scammers gain access to accounts.

• Credential stuffing: This attack type is based on using previously stolen logins and passwords. The thing is that many users often use the same passwords on different services, so stealing one of the passwords from the e-shop can “open” the corporate account as well.

• Social engineering is how attackers manipulate users into sharing confidential information or performing actions compromising security.

Outsider threats

The cybersecurity risks or attacks from individuals or groups outside a company. They include:

• A brute force attack - when the scammers systematically try (automatically) all possible combinations of passwords until the correct one is found.

• Distributed denial of service (DDoS): This is a well-known practice when criminals overload a system with traffic to disrupt operations.

• Exploiting vulnerabilities: This is a much more complicated process that requires more effort. It consists of searching for unpatched software or security weaknesses.

Of course, this is not the complete list of attack types as it is much broader, but the examples above thoroughly describe the risks for the businesses.

How to ensure a secure translation?

To protect your data during the translation process, it is worth implementing the following activities:

• Prevent human errors and insider threats: The regular training for the team allows us to minimize this part of the risks. Ensure that your employees have transparent rules for data and access sharing and understand the basis of cyber protection.

• Add the additional verification steps to your systems. It can be multi- or two-factor authentication, one-time password, security tokens, etc. This step will protect your data from brute force attacks or any other accesses stolen.

• Conduct regular security audits of your software and continuously monitor all activities.

• Create role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure that only authorized users (such as specific translators) can access documents.

• Choose a secure translation software with high-level security and features like logs, RBAC, backups, etc.

• Train employees regularly: Many security incidents originate from phishing, credential theft, or other forms of social engineering. Regular awareness training helps reduce these risks.

How does LingoHub ensure secure translation?

Security is built into every stage of the localization workflow. LingoHub combines secure infrastructure with administrative controls that help organizations protect multilingual content throughout the translation process.

Key security capabilities include:

• Enterprise-grade infrastructure: LingoHub runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and protects customer data through encrypted data transfer and encrypted storage.

• Authentication and access management: Features such as two-factor authentication, SAML single sign-on (SSO), and role-based permissions help organizations control who can access workspaces, projects, languages, and resources.

• Activity tracking and auditing: Activity and audit logs provide visibility into user actions and support security reviews and compliance requirements.

• Secure integrations: Repository and application integrations reduce the need to exchange translation files through email or shared folders by synchronizing content directly with connected systems.

• Compliance and operational security: LingoHub supports organizations with GDPR-compliant processes and enterprise security practices designed for modern localization workflows. LingoHub is also ISO 27001 and SOC-2, Type II compliant.

Conclusion

The translation process is an additional step that can increase company threats, as data transfer and additional software are always new risks.

As a translation management software provider, we at LingoHub understand all the security nuances for businesses and provide comprehensive solutions that can speed up and improve the localization process and the tools to build safe processes.

If you have unique needs or additional questions, let’s discuss them live at the demo call - our team is always happy to help!