Secure translation. Is my data safe?

With the development of the IT world, the number of web attacks constantly increases. Today, 94% of organizations report security incidents, and the number of data breaches has increased by 72% over the last 20 years. In essence, we are witnessing a constant "arms race" between security methods and cyber attack tools.

As expected by the number of episodes, the top three targeted companies are large corporations. Still, it does not reduce the danger to other businesses. The most at risk of cybercriminals are:

• Microsoft (57%)
• Apple (10%)
• LinkedIn (7%)

Data security risks exist in any IT area, and the online translation industry isn't an exception. The software translation process sometimes implies translating sensitive content, especially in industries such as medical and legal. However, the leakage of even not very confidential information is a blow to the company's reputation and undermines confidence in all its processes.

Companies should have a strategy and processes for controlling data security to prevent possible damage from cyber attacks. As the translation management software provider, we prepared this article to provide an overview of protecting information during translation and reducing data leaks.

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.

1. 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.
2. Conduct regular security audits of your software and continuously monitor all activities.
3. Create role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure that only authorized users (such as specific translators) can access documents.
4. Choose the secure translation software with high-level security and features like logs, RBAC, backups, etc.

How does Lingohub ensure secure translation?

As the translation management system, we at Lingohub are intensely targeted on system security and provide a list of valuable features that allow our customers to improve their processes both from the localization and security sides.

Built-in approaches:

• Cloud environment and world-class data centers. Lingohub runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and benefits from Amazon's security.
• 24/7/365, we control the system status, and it is available to check for our users.
• Encrypted backups and GDPR compliance to keep all data safe.
• Lingohub implemented strong encryption, ensuring secure data transport via HTTPS, with encryption (applied during data transfer and at rest).

Additionally, we provide features that customers can use to improve their security policy.

• Two-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access to the Lingohub application, even if the primary accesses are lost or stolen.
• SAML SSO. With this method, the user credentials are only transmitted between the authentication provider and the application, minimizing the risk of leaks.
• Role-based accesses allow customers to create custom roles and assign them to users. With Lingohub, you can even provide different accesses based on the project or language. This feature is helpful if you want to restrict access to the project with sensitive data to a part of your team.
• Smooth integrations with apps and repositories to prevent file transfer via email or other platforms. One of the security risks is data moving; with Lingohub, you do not need to do this anymore. With synchronization between the repository/app and Lingohub, all the data is synchronized without additional risks.
• Logged everything for profound control. Using Lingohub, customers can control every employee activity, from text edits to the Audit, Api, and Integration activities.

To sum up

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!