If you rewind the clock back 50 years, the rich were those who had a big bankroll in their pocket. This was before most of us had credit cards. Debit cards were a nice idea and the concept of PayPal was a pipe dream. Fast forward to 2013 and we all know that money is still power, but getting your hands on sensitive data seems to be the way to riches.
Of course stealing secrets is nothing new. The Romans were some of the first to invent rudimentary forms of encryption to send battle plans safely between troops. If you are a spy fan, everything from James Bond, to Get Smart, to the latest television show The Americans, shows how important stealing secrets can be.
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A recent incident in the news illustrates a common problem with sensitive and confidential information. People can and do make mistakes when it comes to properly handling personally identifiable information (PII).
According to news reports, insurance documents from 1996 and 1997 were accidentally placed into a Tooele County, Utah employee’s personnel file. The documents had names and Social Security numbers that were not his. The information had been misfiled a long time ago and was scanned to an electronic version.
When he was terminated from his job, he asked for his employee file. He got everything on a CD and discovered the insurance documents. He contacted the state Attorney General’s office since he knew something was wrong. He wondered how many other people may have PII in their files and was concerned for his privacy.
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Woe the poor business person as she rushes to her next meeting. She has to meet a customer at 10:00 and realizes she forgot her presentation. She jumps in a cab and calls someone back at the office.
“Would you please email me that presentation we worked on yesterday?”
“It’s too big to go through our email system. Remember IT put a 10Mb limit on attachments.”
“OK, put it in Dropbox. I can get it as soon as I get to the customer’s office.”
“Are you sure? This has all that financial data in it. What if it gets out to our competition?”
Does this sound familiar?
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eDocument Sciences joined with Fasoo.com and its partners ACT Solutions, Brite Computers, Ricoh and Toshiba this year at the RSA Conference 2013 in San Francisco. The booth was very busy with a lot of customers interested in ways to protect the most important information in their businesses. This years themes focused on protecting data from mobile up to the cloud. Fasoo had a lot of new graphics in the booth and some interactive demos and videos showing just how to stop data breaches and keep your business safe.
Just like last year, the talk of the floor was about all the unauthorized intrusions and hacking going on as more sophisticated attacks continue from governments and rogue organizations. Stealing medical information has become very big business as discussed in a few of the sessions. Just in the last few days, Evernote was added to the list of high profile attacks as hackers stole email addresses and passwords. While there is still a lot of talk about perimeter security solutions, a lot of companies are realizing that they need to worry more about their data and not the perimeter. If you build a higher wall, the bad guys will just bring a taller ladder.
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Today Fasoo launched DigitalQuick, its new beta cloud security service. This is very timely with all the recent news about cyber espionage and hacking by the Chinese army. Sophisticated computer hacking makes all of us more vulnerable to data breaches and theft of our intellectual property.
These hacking stories make me realize that no one is immune. Stories about cyber espionage focus on either stealing corporate secrets or infiltrating government or infrastructure systems. The Chinese hackers seem to be targeting companies and trying to steal intellectual property. This information is typically sitting in documents on desktops, servers, mobile devices and in the cloud.
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