BreachExchange mailing list archives

Re: They Take it Seriously? Oh, Sure


From: "Adrian Sanabria" <adrian.sanabria () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 11:16:47 -0500

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 () 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/
>
>
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> http://attrition.org/dataloss
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>
>
>
>
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_______________________________________________
Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () attrition org)
http://attrition.org/dataloss
Tracking more than 144 million compromised records in 540 incidents over 7 years.



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