How High… How Low: Part 2
… OK, so now the story is that there was some confidential information on the stolen PC - and that it was emailed from an internal account to the one on the PC.
How many times have you emailed something either to or from a personal email account - just because it was convenient? Several I suspect. Once again, it didn’t used to be a crime to lose a laptop, but it virtually is now… similarly no-one used to mind (or notice) if email came and went from personal accounts - but that’s all changed. Technology can now be deployed to prevent this type of ‘accident’ from happening - and of course process, procedure and policy should also be changed to prevent it from occurring. Education is once again top of the list. Why is it bad to use ‘public’ email (the data’s in the clear for one thing!), why should you check the recipients (The Wrong Dave…), why does this keep happening… Time to wise up…
The Wrong Dave
We’ve all done it - a little too quick on the ’send’ button and email has gone to the wrong person. Email systems are just trying to be helpful when they predict which email address you want based on the first few letters.. ‘d’, ‘a’, ‘v’, {return} and you inadvertently have selected the incorrect recipient. Usually it doesn’t matter but in a case this week it did. The consequences are, in this case, not too great - but imagine it was health information, or credit card details. There is technology out there (and yes Symantec has some), which looks at the content of email and can prevent them going outside the organization - or rather can check if that is what you really meant to do.
Content based classification and automated policy management is available today and can solve the problem of ‘the wrong Dave’.
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