Safeguarding Data Securing data against exposure and destruction

Contents  News stories  Techniques  How those techniques could have helped  5 questions you should ask

Marie Lupe Cooley  Administrative assistant at Stephen E Hutchins Architects  Read a job description that matched her job; duties and contact details identical  Concluded she was about to be fired  Deleted 7 years of architectural plans  Damage estimated at $2.5 million

Marie Lupe Cooley  Job was for her boss’s wife’s firm  Plans weren’t backed up at all  Specialist firm reconstructed the files  Supposing Cooley had uploaded junk data to overwrite the segments?

Edison Chen  Canadian born singer and actor in Hong Kong  Sent his laptop in for servicing  Technicians found pornographic pictures of Chen with starlets  Published the photos on the internet  27-year old Chen announced his retirement in February

Francis Ford Coppola  Coppola trying to recover a computer stolen in a burglary  Contained a script Coppola had been working on for years  Script backed up on an external hard drive  Burglars also found and stole the hard drive

Britons’ banking details  2 CDs containing banking details of 25 million Britons posted to London from Newcastle  Data collected by HM Customs and Excise  Disks went missing and still haven’t been recovered

Britons’ banking details  Jeremy Clarkson believed data could not be used to hack accounts  Published his own banking details  Ethical hacker able to set up a direct deposit of £500 from his account to the Diabetes Foundation

Jerome Kerviel  Trader at Societe Generale in France  First worked in the back office  Then was made a Hedge Trader  His back office rights weren’t revoked  Kerviel set up several personas and traded under those IDs

Jerome Kerviel  Initially he was very successful  Subprime crisis in the US occurred  In all, his trades lost 5.8 billion Euros (over R70 billion)  Kerviel is on trial for fraud

Techniques  Backup servers (don’t use a main server as a backup server)  Some companies provide a data backup service for a monthly fee  User groups and access controls  Encryption  Erasing data off retired hardware

Access Control in action

Questions  Are users prevented from accessing data unrelated to their jobs?  Are users prevented from editing or deleting data unrelated to their job?  If a user’s role changes, are any access rights inappropriate to the new role revoked?

Questions  Is all vital data backed up in a geographically separate location from the primary data source?  When sensitive data is stored or transmitted, what is done to guard against exposure or corruption?