Archive for November, 2008

Vishing Very Vicious

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Ah, the fun and joys of texting, and everything else that accompanies cell phones and smart phones!
The dirty dogs who created phishing saw great opportunity to move their electronic social engineering scam to the phone to try and dupe anyone who falls for their seductive lures of saving large sums of money, winning huge pots of money, or otherwise seeing or participating in salacious activities and fun. Vishing criminals also try tactics of scaring you into giving them your personally identifiable information (PII) by threatening you with lawsuits, or worse.

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Vishing Very Vicious

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Ah, the fun and joys of texting, and everything else that accompanies cell phones and smart phones!
The dirty dogs who created phishing saw great opportunity to move their electronic social engineering scam to the phone to try and dupe anyone who falls for their seductive lures of saving large sums of money, winning huge pots of money, or otherwise seeing or participating in salacious activities and fun. Vishing criminals also try tactics of scaring you into giving them your personally identifiable information (PII) by threatening you with lawsuits, or worse.

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France Performing Audits To Check For Spam

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

While doing some research on data protection laws in France, I found it interesting to learn that this past September the French data protection authority (CNIL) stared auditing businesses to check for unlawful spam operations.

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There’s No Good Reason Why Barack Obama Should Give Up His BlackBerry

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

If security is done effectively and correctly, this is just silly…

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CMS Gets Heat Over Not Actively Enforcing HIPAA

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

To date the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not actively pursued HIPAA Security Rule compliance. Instead they have depended upon complaints to drive their investigations. However, as this article nicely points out, depending upon patients and healthcare workers to complain about problems leaves MANY HIPAA non-compliance issues…including significant information security and privacy vulnerabilities…dangerously unknown…

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Traveling PII

Monday, November 17th, 2008

This is the second week in a row that I’ve been traveling and doing conference sessions, keynotes and my 2-day training class, so I’ve been a bit lax in my blog postings simply because of lack of time.
One of the things I like to do while traveling is to take notes about the many different types of personally identifiable information (PII) I see and hear while traveling. Traveling presents many significant risks to PII and other businss information, and not enough organizations provide training to their personnel to help them understand how to reduce those risks.
Here are a few of my notes from these current two weeks of travel…

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Traveling PII

Monday, November 17th, 2008

This is the second week in a row that I’ve been traveling and doing conference sessions, keynotes and my 2-day training class, so I’ve been a bit lax in my blog postings simply because of lack of time.
One of the things I like to do while traveling is to take notes about the many different types of personally identifiable information (PII) I see and hear while traveling. Traveling presents many significant risks to PII and other businss information, and not enough organizations provide training to their personnel to help them understand how to reduce those risks.
Here are a few of my notes from these current two weeks of travel…

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Example Of How Many Healthcare Providers Do Not Understand HIPAA

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

HIPAA is misunderstood by many personnel who work for healthcare providers; probably because they do not receive effective or good training about HIPAA. Here is a good example of how healthcare providers inappropriately withhold information in the name of HIPAA…

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U.S. Do Not Call Registry Accuracy

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

The “Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007 Report to congress: regarding the Accuracy of the Do Not Call Registry” was just released a few days ago.
I found the following excerpt interesting…

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FTC Applies GLBA & FTC Act Sanctions To Mortgage Lender

Monday, November 10th, 2008

I anticipate that with the big $700 billion “rescue” plan the government is going to continue the increased compliance activities…

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