A few years ago it was reported that since 2007 the NHS has been the source of almost one third of the data breaches reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and more recently fines have topped £90,000 for trusts whose staff have faxed confidential information to members of the public by mistake. These Information Security Breaches all occurred simply because staff had dialled the wrong number when sending a fax.
Just last year, the Bank of Scotland was fined £75,000 by the ICO after “at least 21 documents” over a 4 year period were sent to several members of the public whose fax numbers were just 1 digit different from the intended recipient. (Full details: Bank of Scotland receives £75K penalty after four year fax blunder.)
As one of the biggest fax providers in the UK with equipment in every major telephone exchange in the land, established and run by an innovative team of engineers, we sat down and thought: with our huge network of resources and collective know-how, there must be something we can develop to help these organisations avoid these terrible blunders and astronomical fines. Not to mention of course protecting hospital patients’ and mortgage customers’ privacy! We already have a hugely successful product called SecureFax, already in use by the NHS and many other financial institutions, which enables secure receipt of confidential information such as credit card numbers and patient information via fax in a secure, 256-bit encrypted web portal, so we thought we must be able to come up with a solution to make fines from the ICO due to fax number misdials impossible and a thing of the past.
So after much head-scratching, coffee drinking, discussions with our advisory board, and consultation with industry experts and healthcare professionals, WhiteFax™ was born.
“WhiteFax™ stops dead the accidental sending of faxes to wrong numbers.”
So what is WhiteFax and how does it work? The beauty of WhiteFax lies in its simplicity: no extra procedures or staff training is required, and you don’t even have to upgrade your existing fax machine or change your fax number. Anyone using a protected fax machine won’t know any different! Put simply, WhiteFax allows you to specify a “white list” of fax numbers which your fax machine is allowed to dial. If a number is dialled which isn’t permitted on your white list, the person sending a fax will just hear an error tone and the transmission is stopped right in its tracks.
WhiteFax works by using a small in-line adaptor between your fax machine and the telephone socket at the wall. This seamlessly routes all calls made by that fax machine via the Crosby Fax platform (hosted on the Telecoms Cloud network) by prefixing the number dialled with our special 03 access number, so that they can be screened against your whitelist (for an added layer of security you can enable call barring on the line so only the access number can be dialled). Once the call is in our network, we recognise who you are by the number calling and then check that the number being faxed is allowed. If it is, the call is then allowed to pass through and out of our network again, but it’s rejected if a wrong fax number has been dialled.
Maintain your Fax Number Whitelist Online, 24 Hours a Day
Just like everything else on our network, you can manage your whitelist of permitted fax numbers instantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by logging in to your Crosby Fax account. A full audit trail is logged of every single change or addition to your whitelist, so you can keep full visibility of your account. Need to send a fax urgently to a number which isn’t already on your whitelist? No problem – any party authorised to administer your Crosby Fax account can login and add a new number to the whitelist and it will instantly be permitted.
The WhiteFax service is currently in Beta and we’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions for the service, especially if you’re an NHS trust or other registered Data Controller. If you’d like to help us trial the system, please get in touch.
