Computer users often disregard security advice from technicians and IT personnel. Technicians do not have time to communicate all of the possible dangers when they give advice. One of the reasons that it is difficult to communicate this effectively is that most computer users are not properly exposed to the stories of what happens in the technology world. The odd time that technology horror stories do make the mainstream news, they are often not reported accurately.

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I am not aware of this happening in Red Deer or Central Alberta as of yet, but I am sure it’s only a matter of time until it does.

Stories of techs and IT personell who overstep their bounds, steal data, or go rogue do not often make the mainstream media. However, as one who follows tech news closely, there are more stories then most people are aware of. Numerous people that have worked in big box store tech departments have either been caught, admitted to, or have claimed that coworkers/excoworkers comb computers for photos, videos, music or other personal files for their own “uses”.

Numerous celebrities have been embarrassed by photos or other files being made public. IT is potentially one of the sources for leaks.

PR spokespersons for big box stores and IT companies can easily claim that abuse of privilege never happens because they have a policy against it. That’s kind of like claiming that your employees are never late, never miss a coffee break, never take an extended coffee break or extended lunch break, don’t txt their friends or use facebook at work and never steal from their employer because that is company policy.

All of the preceding ramble has been to give some background as to why “the cloud” makes IT a bit nervous. There are steps you can take to monitor and protect your own computers and networks from data loss. Controlling physical access is a big part of that. Setting security policies to help limit access is another part of that.

When your data is stored somewhere “in the cloud”, you do not know who has physical access to it, you do not know how good the security is, you do not know how well everything is monitored. Do you or don’t you believe companies claims about the security and reliability of their service? Are you going to use “the cloud” for all of your data, data that isn’t sensitive, or for none of your data?

When you realize that your data is stored on someone else’s computer, when you have some awareness of the lengths to which government has gone in the past to be able to access data, when you regularly read about large companies having their data stolen, when you have a rough idea of what is breakable in terms of security, it becomes difficult to believe that the owners of large datacentres don’t have any ability to get into the data that is stored on them. No matter what they claim.

http://tiny.cc/nw7wc

This story is on the discovery of a 500GB external drive that had been very “cheap”, but upon further investigation was not a 500GB drive. A product like this could have resulted in unrecoverable data loss before one realized that there was anything wrong.

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Several days ago, a security breach was announced by a company called Epsilon. Apparently Epsilon is a third party marketing company that is contracted by many large companies to handle their e-mail campaigns. Best Buy and Air Miles are among the clients that have contracted Epsilon for services. There will likely be a significant increase in e-mail phishing scams and infection attempts to the e-mail addresses that were stolen.

Massive Email Breach Exposes Data From 50+ Major Retailers, Including Target

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After Epsilon: Avoiding Phishing Scams & Malware

http://tiny.cc/ekb0q

Seven Tips to Avoid Post-Epsilon Phishing

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Original Story: http://tiny.cc/2vozy

When I read the tech’s original story, the part that jumped out at me was this: “The findings are false-positive proof since I have used the tool that discovered it for six years now and I am yet to see it misidentify an item throughout the years.”

Wow. I found this to be the most shocking allegation of all. I would not be willing to personally put money on any antivirus program that has been around for 6 years having that flawless of a record. It smacks of naivety. For the record, antivirus programs both miss infections that are real as well as falsely claim that files are infected that aren’t. If one has any appreciation for the changes in recent years to infection techniques, it is not even remotely surprising that all products are less than perfect. The sheer number of infection techniques as well as the resources devoted to discovering and exploiting those techniques is constantly rising due to the various schemes that are used to monetize infections.

Here is Sunbelt Software admitting that the problem is due to their software mis-identifying a folder: http://tiny.cc/uk6bn

The lesson to take from this story is: Antivirus software is fallible. Claiming that a system is free of infection is not necessarily correct. Claiming that a file or folder is infected is also not necessarily correct.

Article about the Bill: http://tiny.cc/a8hsk

Recommendations from Zero-Spam: http://tiny.cc/cvgb0

http://tiny.cc/57k4k

Ars Technica: http://tiny.cc/f1nq5

Gadget Labs: http://tiny.cc/n1nfk

Maximum PC: http://tiny.cc/gd2gz

“Only about 20 percent of antivirus products would detect this file”

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