Archive for June, 2008

Locational Privacy…And Nonconsenting Research Subjects

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Here’s an interesting, relatively new, privacy (with regard to publicity any way) issue that was reported today: locational privacy…

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Insider Threat Example: Coworkers Accessing Other Coworkers’ Email Messages

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Back in the mid-1990’s, a middle manager knew that the print queue messages for all the emails in the large organization were viewable in clear text; all you had to know was which printer queue to open. He would lurk in the print queues each day, all day, for all the printers all the other middle managers, and executives, used, and he would copy all the email messages he found that could be “advantageous” to his career. He amazed a lot of people by always seeming to know what was going on before anyone else did.
I was reminded of this particular mole-manager as I just read a news story, “Philly News Anchor Target in FBI Probe: FBI Investigates Anchor in Suspected Hacking of Fired Co-Anchor’s E-mail

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How To Create Information Security & Privacy Case Studies

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Over the years I’ve done a lot of information security, privacy and compliance training and awareness activities; content creation, delivery, tools, and a large variety of other related activities. I’ve found doing case studies to be one of the most effective, and most interesting and popular, type of training activity.
I’ve created dozens, and perhaps even hundreds, of case studies throughout the years. Case studies engage your personnel in thinking in ways that just telling them information cannot do, noticeably change their work habits, and measurably impact their opinions about information security and privacy.
In the third article of the May 2008 issue of my IT Compliance in Realtime Journal, “Creating Effective Case Studies for Information Security and Privacy Training” I provide direction for how to create effective case studies within any type of organization.
The following is an unformatted copy of the article, without the sidebar information and illustrations; download the PDF version of the article to see those…

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Internal Threat Example: Lending Tree Privacy Breach And Civil Suit

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Last month (May 2008…yes, it is June already!) Lending Tree got slapped with a civil suit alleging their personnel allowed mortgage lenders access to customer’s personally identifiable information (PII) and other confidential information.
The suit charges that Lending Tree did not have appropriate or adequate information safeguards in place, resulting in the employees using names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, income information, and assorted other personal information, to market their own mortgage loans to the LendingTree customers.
The class-action lawsuit, (this is from a subscription site) represents all Lending Tree customers who submitted loan request forms to the company between Jan. 1 2006 and May 1, 2008.
From the case file…

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