Business Info Fact of the Day: PII Increasingly Stored On MP3 Players

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Over the past few months during some of my presentations I've discussed how easily PII can be stored on mobile storage devices that most business leaders and information security folks often do not think about or overlook. One of those devices is the innocent-looking and seemingly benign MP3 player, such as the cool ipod. You gotta love'em! I know I love mine. However, a couple of times when I talked about how easy it is to store large amounts of company data, including personally identifiable information (PII), onto MP3 players, I got some noticeable snickers and sneers from a few in the audience who apparently thought such an idea was preposterous!

Well, here are a couple of different news articles that demonstrates otherwise; both about the same incident, but each with slightly different information...

"NZ man accesses US military secrets" and "NZ man finds US military files on MP3 player".

Files...reportedly 60 pages worth...of PII about U.S. military members were on an MP3 player a young man from New Zealand purchased for $15 - $18 from an Oklahoma thrift shop.

NOTE: The U.S. Department of Defense banned the use of "portable data storage devices" in November 2008.

If data can be stored on any type of device, you can bet that it will be, even if the primary use for the device is not for data storage

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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 the past two decades. 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 world's best privacy experts and on their list of the best privacy consulting firms in both 2007 and 2008. 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 13th 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.

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