Unpacking Slack Hacks: 6 Ways to Protect Sensitive Data with Secure Collaboration

Nowadays, sensitive and critical data is traveling in everyday business channels that offer only the basic level of security and encryption, and companies are often oblivious to the risk. A case in point: Disney suffered a devastating data leak by a hacktivist group known as NullBulge that got hold of over 1.2 terabytes of data from Disney's internal Slack messaging channels. The breach exposed sensitive information, including:

• details about unreleased projects,
• computer code,
• login details and passwords, and
• Intellectual Property (IP) and corporate secrets.

Slack breaches have also impacted companies like Uber, Rockstar, and Electronic Arts (EA). Cisco Webex used by the German Bundeswehr leaked data from hundreds of meetings, some classified. Outlook was breached by Chinese hackers last year.

We have nothing against any of the tools above. They are all great collaboration tools. However, just like companies don't allow developers to use just any old tool to push code to production (hint, they often use privileged access management), they should not allow the use of unauthorized channels for sensitive and business-critical communications that involve restricted, confidential, or secret data. This is why we at SSH Communications Security have built a solution portfolio to address the need.

Let's go through the six ways our solution can secure sensitive communications.

Introducing SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 for sensitive communications

1. Authorized for sharing sensitive data

Ever since inventing the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, the company namesake, we at SSH have been obsessed with security. We are an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified company. Our SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 portfolio includes products that have achieved the TL III security classification (EU confidential) by the NCSA function of Traficom, the official approver of cryptographic products in Finland.

This is why SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 is trusted by authorities, government bodies, banks, and law firms alike.

2. Default security setting: high

While tools like Slack and Teams are great for everyday business discussions, they were not built with a security-first mindset. There are ways to ramp up the security features of both solutions, but they either cost more or require extra configurations to work. What you need is a solution that has end-to-end encryption built-in, ensuring the messages are not decrypted at any point along the way. Senders and recipients can be verified using various strong authentication methods. Even we as the vendor cannot see any correspondence taking place via your authorized channels.

3. Meet data sovereignty requirements with flexible deployment options

Most online collaboration tools are only available as a service, hosted on someone else's cloud. SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 gives you the flexibility to host it in the public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises (or any combination in between) so that you have full control over your secure communication channels and can fully own your sensitive data if needed. You can ensure that your communications don't leave any trace on the public internet.

4. Our secret handshake: let's exchange encryption keys!

How can you make online collaboration super secure? By ensuring that you and your co-communicators exchange your very private encryption keys before the communication even starts! Technically, it all happens under the hood, so it's easy for the user, but you do not start a conversation with anyone before you accept to receive communications from them with our solution. After that, the conversation is just between the people in the group chat or the chat room. Except…

5. Fulfill record-keeping and auditing requirements

…when you need an audit trail. Over the past 2-3 years, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has fined multiple US investor companies for failing to fulfill record-keeping requirements. The companies were guilty of sending and receiving off-channel communications using tools like WhatsApp and Signal. These tools do not produce an adequate and tamper-proof audit trail of activities like our SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 does. Enforcing record-keeping policies is a must.

6. Based on battle-tested technology

Just like the Secure Shell protocol became the de facto standard in human-to-server and server-to-server communications, we chose a technology that is widely used and trusted by authorities and heavily regulated industries all over the world: Element. Solutions like Slack integrate with it for a good reason.

SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 is built on the Element technology, allowing your business to join a network of organizations that are using a platform that is widely available for secure communications.

SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024: Messaging, video/audio calls, rooms, and emails in a single platform

SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 is a comprehensive and super-secure collaboration platform for the most common business-critical and sensitive communication instances. The solution makes it easy to encrypt emails, messages, chat rooms, and audio/video communications for privacy, compliance, and record-keeping purposes.

Some great features not mentioned in the article include:

• Send attachments in chats or emails with up to 1GB data
• Receive inbound messages directly from a website and verified users only
• Choose from various authentication methods, including MFA, OTP, PIN, SSO, and bank IDs
• Flexible permissions control
• Integration with tools like Jira, HubSpot, or GitLab to protect project discussions of sensitive nature

Learn more about SalaX Secure Collaboration 2024 here!