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…
People seem to turn up the volume of their voice when speaking on cell phones. A man in a business suit sat down next to me in the gate area, proceeded to make a call, speaking loudly, of course, and I could not help but hear every word he said. He worked for an information security vendor, and he had just visited the CISO of a large company in town. He talked about company’s current network, and the security risks that he believed that he would find there if his company were hired to do work for them. He said some rather disparaging things about the company and the CISO, along with saying specific details that anyone within earshot could use to compromise security there. I also happened to know the CISO there very well. I told her about what I heard in a very public area, from a very loud voice. It’s likely that vendor rep will never got any work from that company!
A man drinking at a table in the airport bar left his laptop on the table unattended while he went away, out of sight somewhere. He was gone for around 15 minutes. Data could been taken and he never would have known. His latop could certainly have been taken and the thief long gone in 15 minutes!
I also have heard some very confidential information, such as credit card numbers and social security numbers, from loud-talking folks on cell phones.
One woman sitting in the gate area called a health club to take her ex-boyfriend off her account, and proceeded to say, very loudly, her boyfriend’s name, birthdate, phone number, social security number, address, work address and employer. He owed her $260. She also talked about how she had some good lawyers as friends, and that she might just sue him “for fun.”
A woman named “Libby” call to make a purchase and gave her credit card # and provided her address and phone number while sitting in the gate area.
And many, many more…all talking loudly and not really sitting all that close to me.
Tags: awareness and training, Information Security, IT compliance, IT training, mobile working, policies and procedures, privacy training, risk management, security training, travel security