I got the June 1 issue of Newsweek today, and something that’s bothered me ever since I first heard about it was on page 4…
“The Catsouras Conundrum: An Update To Our May 4 Story”
Some important facts were provided that all organizations should learn from:
1) The accident scene photos of Nikki Catsouras’ death were taken and leaked by members of the California Highway Patrol.
2) The Catsouras family spent huge amounts of money, and still are, trying to get the horribly painful photos removed from the Internet.
As I’ve written often, along with anyone else who understands the Internet, once you put something out on the Internet, it will basically be there forever.
Trusted insiders, while doing their job, made a horribly bad decision to send the photos to others. This was reportedly against policies.
What were the policies?
What were the sanctions?
Did these employees know the policies?
Was there regular training explaining the policies and WHY it was important to not share crime and accident scene images?
Such a very sad, sad situation that should never have happened. And now the Catsouras family has deal with this on top of their daughter’s horrible death.
Here are some poignant excerpts from the story:
“Ultimately, the Catsouras family decided to tell Nikki’s story. They thought that it might just help their cause. “We did everything we could before we ever went public,” says Lesli, “but it was just like this war we were fighting by ourselves. Honestly, knowing our daughter’s photos are on 500,000 Web sites versus 5 million just doesn’t matter anymore. They shouldn’t have been on any.””
Indeed. These photos should never have been on the Internet if the personnel had known, been effectively educated about, and followed the policies.
This highlights how the lack of policies and organizational education can have huge and tragic impacts on so many people outside of the organization.
People care. And they have been doing what they can to help this family.
“Within days, a network of lawyers had reached out to the family’s attorney; private citizens from around the country vowed to lobby, volunteer and pray. One man pestered YouTube into removing 20 video montages of the still images.”
Organizations, in every industry, must establish policies, effective controls and provide ongoing education to keep from having the personal information of their employees, customers, consumers and citizens from being leaked and used for any number of unforeseen terrible things.
Do you have policies and ongoing training and awareness for how images of customers, employees, etc. must be safeguarded?
Tags: awareness and training, Catsouras, Information Security, insider threat, IT compliance, IT training, policies and procedures, privacy training, risk management, security training