Identity theft is most often associated with the act of stealing an individual’s identity. Businesses have all the sorts of personal data like taxation and bank account details that individuals have, which can be stolen and abused. These are not just security breaches or employees misusing corporate assets here but also an identity thief pretending to be someone within a company who has the authority to make financial transactions, just like they might pretend to be another individual.

In fact, a business may be an even more tempting target for an identity thief than an individual because businesses have high credit limits, substantial bank accounts, and make big payments to vendors on a regular basis. The consequences can be dire, particularly for small businesses where the founder’s or owner’s finances are deeply entangled with the company’s.

How is identity theft committed?

Every act of identity theft begins with a thief gaining access to one or more pieces of personal information about the victim. The credit agency Experian has a good a good outline of the various overlapping ways that this can happen. Thieves can, for instance:

• Steal your mail to harvest data from your bills or bank accounts
• Hack into your home or corporate network and intercept browsing data or emails
• Steal your mobile phone and get access to the treasure trove of personal data you walk around with every day
• Send you phishing emails to trick you into giving up your personal information
• Buy data dumps on the dark web, many of which include personal information derived from data breaches of corporate databases

Many of these techniques would work on both individuals and businesses. Businesses are often less strict about controlling “personally” identifying information than individuals, since certain facts about businesses must be public by law, and a business is run by multiple people and lines of responsibility may be diffuse.

Prevention of identity theft in organizations

• Use devices like security tokens or keys
• Go passwordless
• Use biometric security like fingerprint authentication
• Implement authentication standards like FIDO2

Which security tokens are available for identity theft protection?

Many security tokens or keys are available for protecting identity theft in small as well as large enterprises: