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« Enron, ethics and opportunists...quick follow-up | Main | What Happens When Trusted Insiders Turn Against You... »

PII Paper

Today it was widely reported that the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette inadvertantly distributed credit and bank card numbers of as many as 240,000 subscribers with bundles of T&G newspapers on Sunday.  (See http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/02/01/subscriber_credit_data_distributed_by_mistake/ for one story on this).

I don't know much about the mechanics of a newspaper printing press, but when I went on a tour of one (admittedly more years ago than I'm going to admit) the way the paper was printed was completely separate from the computer systems and customer databases.  Yes, I'm probably living in the dark ages, and probably modern news publication advancements now allow for direct printing of the paper with just a press of a computer keyboard button, but I'm still trying to figure out how what sounds like a subscriber database listing got printed with the Sunday funnies!  Is it as simple a lack of access controls?  Lack of separation of duties?

It reinforces in my mind the need to encrypt personally identifiable information (PII) in storage.  If the database *HAD* been encrypted, then would just some hieroglyphic-looking pages been bundled with the Sunday news?

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Posted by Rebecca Herold on February 6, 2006 2:01 AM |

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.