Much of that lack of security can be chalked up to changes in the working environment in the past decade, Stickley says. “There
are so many new employees and temporary employees in companies that it is very easy to get into an office and have free reign.”
To prevent thefts similar to those at the University of California, Stickley recommends strict monitoring of everyone who
enters and leaves a building. “Chaperone [guests]. If people come in pairs, don’t let them split up. If they complain, just
say it’s corporate policy,” Stickley says.
For laptops that contain sensitive data, a tracking device such as an RFID tag should be adhered to the device’s hard drive,
vendors say.
Bill Hancock, chief security officer at Savvis, an IT services provider, is an ardent advocate of tagging mobile computers.
“I see a lot of laptops, and most of them don’t have any type of identification on them. So if they do get lost, how are they
going to get back to the owner?” The investment in some tags for laptops is a quick and relatively cheap security measure,
Hancock says.
Shore up password security
LexisNexis, a top-tier content aggregator, fell prey to a more invisible, malevolent threat. In March, company officials went
public about internal review of data-search activity, which revealed that passwords issued to Seisint customers were used
to steal Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, names, and addresses of some 30,000 customers. A short time later,
officials upped the number to 280,000 clients whose personal information may have been compromised. Ultimately, LexisNexis
said its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords.
Massive datacenters such as those maintained by LexisNexis are a favored target of hackers because the information provides
potential combinations to financial vaults elsewhere, BindView’s Loveless says. “As someone who breached companies like this
in my youth, I know it can be done.” He says it’s likely the hackers found passwords that hadn’t been purged from the system.
LexisNexis concedes that its problems were indeed aggravated by customers’ ex-employees who maintained access to the service
using passwords no-one bothered to cancel.
Savvis’s Hancock cites an unacceptable breakdown in password protection and authentication policies. “Companies have a process
that works up to a point, but then it breaks down because of human error,” he says. Automation, he asserts, can avert such
mishaps.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
