[Dataloss] They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure

Adrian Sanabria adrian.sanabria at gmail.com
Sat Jan 20 11:16:47 EST 2007


Maybe that's their problem. All employees should be required to read and
follow information security policies and procedures to protect data, and in
the real world, even when employees are required to read it (they often
don't even know the 150 page doc exists), they're likely to be in a
near-comatose drooling trance long before they finish reading 150 pages of
policies and standards.

The most effective way to do it that I've seen is through mandatory training
and awareness campaigns. Without fully analyzing the cause of all their
breaches, this theory is not much more than hot air, but it is, at the very
least, a likely contributor.

--Adrian

On 1/11/07, George Toft <george at myitaz.com> wrote:
>
> In UC's defense, they have a very aggressive information protection
> policy - something like 150 pages of policy/procedure designed to
> protect information as required by GLBA (it's been a while since I read
> it, so my page count might be off).
>
> I think they are the exception rather than the rule as they've done more
> than most to protect their data.
>
> George Toft, CISSP, MSIS
> My IT Department
> www.myITaz.com
> 623-203-1760
>
> Confidential data protection experts for the financial industry.
>
>
> Richard Forno wrote:
> > They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure
> > January 9th, 2007 by Dan Gillmor
> >
> > (I originally wrote this for PR Week magazine.)
> >
> > Several weeks ago, UCLA acknowledged that some of its computers had been
> > hacked. Obeying a state law, it notified more than 800,000 people that
> their
> > personal data, including Social Security numbers, might have ended up in
> the
> > wrong hands.
> >
> > The fact that the data got loose wasn¹t all that striking.
> Unfortunately,
> > that¹s all too common. What struck me was this statement from a hapless
> UCLA
> > honcho: ³We have a responsibility to safeguard personal information, an
> > obligation that we take very seriously.²
> >
> > When and where have I heard that before? All kinds of times and places,
> > actually. It¹s becoming a mantra that means almost nothing.
> >
> > Try this: Plug ³we take² and ³very seriously² into a Google News or
> Yahoo
> > News search. You¹ll get hundreds of hits, albeit some repeats, where
> some
> > big institution - corporate, educational, government, whatever - makes a
> > giant blunder and then issues a ³we take (insert the violated policy)
> very
> > seriously² statement.
> >
> > < - >
> >
> > http://citmedia.org/blog/2007/01/09/they-take-it-seriously-oh-sure/
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss at attrition.org)
> > http://attrition.org/dataloss
> > Tracking more than 143 million compromised records in 529 incidents over
> 6 years.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
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> Tracking more than 143 million compromised records in 530 incidents over 7
> years.
>
>
>
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