The Problem
The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in a great many people working from home. This includes a team of analysts working for a major investment bank.
John, the team lead, finds himself sharing his workspace with his flatmate, also required to be working from home. John’s flatmate, who has been a friend since university days, works as an analyst for a different global investment bank. Prior to now they have had no difficulty maintaining boundaries between their personal and professional lives.
John worries that with the two of them working in close proximity his laptop and phone may prove to be something of an irresistible temptation to his very ambitious flatmate.
How CoolRock Helped
John made contact with his IT Manager who moved quickly to install the Obsidian Gate application on each of John’s devices. The IT Department created an easily predicted password and a repository of decoy documents.
John has created a more secure set of credentials that enable him to access his working documents.
Outcome and Benefits
By enabling the use of two sets of credentials, Obsidian…
The Problem
A major financial institution is operating in numerous jurisdictions and is well used to teams coming together from different parts of the world. They work out of their own individual offices using a major videoconferencing platform when they need to meet. Documents surrounding the meetings are shared on their corporate intranet as they realise that the document share facility on the video conferencing platform is largely unsecured.
At the beginning of this year a major restructuring surrounding legacy archives was embarked upon. Much of the data in the legacy archives was extremely sensitive.
With the advent of COVID-19 a decision was made that all executives had to, where possible, work from home. In some countries the law mandated that their employees had no choice but to work from home. The restructuring of the archiving systems and transfer of data to a different platform had already commenced when the decision to work from home was given to the team undertaking the task.
In many countries where team members worked, it was discovered that the intranet worked inefficiently and the sharing of documents became very difficult because of Internet speeds. There was concern that sharing documents by email also presented with security issues. SMS messaging was being used widely for speed and ease-of-use. Although secure, SMS was not captured easily by the company and therefore discussions between senior managers were taking place, around the project, that could not be audited. There was a need to manage electronic communication to ensure project security and to ensure compliance with corporate policy and procedure.
How CoolRock Helped
The choice was made to use Obsidian for all communication surrounding the project. This ensured that emails, attachments, data and SMS messaging surrounding the project is fully encrypted at all times. There is also the capacity to audit the electronic communication and to protect documents and data by a sophisticated system of alerts and permissions.
Outcome and Benefits
As a result of the implementation of Obsidian…
The Problem
In the course of conducting a routine audit at Acme Consulting, a member of Smith & Co’s audit team was approached by an Acme clerical employee who, with a good deal of trepidation, raised concerns over what seemed to be a series of fraudulent transactions.
The local Director of Sales appeared to be raising false invoices, and lodging these with a friendly conspirator within a client organisation. Although there was an outstanding debt on the books, the inflated sales figures ensured the local results were contributing favourably to Acme’s global earnings, the market was happy and the Director continued to receive his bonuses. A preliminary review by Smith & Co led to a recommendation for a forensic audit.
How CoolRock Helped
At the direction of Acme Consulting’s Board of Management, Smith & Co’s Forensic Audit specialists were mobilised to conduct an audit. The IT Director assigned temporary permissions to the audit team, enabling them to access data in Obsidian’s encrypted data stores.
The team very quickly detected discrepancies between consultants’ time sheets and invoices raised. They were further able to show that the Director of Sales had generated fraudulent invoices by overriding internal controls.
As encrypted data is transparently decrypted on access after authentication, the Forensic Audit Team moved hastily to gather evidence. In fact within one day the team had planned their approach, gathered compelling evidence and prepared a report sufficient to take the matter before a court of law.