[Discuss] Most common (or Most important) privacy leaks

[Ryan Pugatch]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015, at 08:42 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
> I see a lot of people and businesses out there, that just don't care
> about their own privacy.  They email passwords to each other, W2's with
> salary and social security information, photocopies of drivers' licenses
> and passports to be used by HR to complete I-9 forms...
> 
> As an IT person advising a business to be more responsible, what areas do
> you advocate securing most urgently?  IT admin credentials?  HR records? 
> Financial records?  Other stuff?  Simply everything, bar none?
> 
> Email is obviously a huge area of insecure information sharing.  Do you
> also see a lot of people storing information that should be secured in
> other non-private services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc?


Training is pretty important and if you handle personally identifiable
information, then your organization would fall under MA 201 CMR 17.00 if
you are in Massachusetts.  Part of the regulation is that you have a
written security policy and in doing so it'll force you to do the due
diligence to track where PII is in your organization and document it. 
You'd also find yourself having to deliver annual PII handling training
to your organization, which usually consists of password security, clean
desk / clean screen, how to handle sensitive data, etc.

One of the important things in an organization is to make it so IT is a
valued business partner, so that when the business wants to figure out
how to do something (like transmit social security numbers) that they
would come to you to help find a solution, rather than signing up for a
Dropbox account.

Then there's the other stuff you can do from an IT perspective: have
2FA, implement Single Sign On so people don't have a bunch of accounts
to maintain and so you can cut just one account to eliminate access to
everything, password security minimums, etc.

-- 
Ryan Pugatch
rpug at lp0.org
Boston, MA

on the web:
www.ryanp.com (homepage)
www.lp0.org (blog)