From eBay to the Moon – they walk among us

Aliens? No. Lazy people – and not me on a football Sunday (Warning to my wife: 9/7 opens the regular season).

Ok, maybe lazy is too harsh based on how hard we all work, but the reality is that people continue to overlook the basic steps to keep data secure.

And with nearly 200M personal records lost globally in just the last two years (Attrition.org), somebody might want to get on that. The two most recent examples are circulating today:

1) Graham Cluley of Sophos (full disclosure, a CHEN client) today blogged on a Wired post about a piece of malware that made it all the way to the International Space Station – via NASA. And they admit it's not the first one to boldly go where few have gone before.

2) A (fortunately) good citizen alerted authorities to the fact that a computer he bought on eBay for $64 included highly sensitive personal information of more than 1M customers of the Royal Bank of Scotland, American Express and NatWest. Seems an archiving company employee had sold the PC on his own without erasing the data.

And from a purely business standpoint, recent Sophos research found 81% of business computers lacking the most basic protections such as updated antivirus, patches or desktop firewalls -- some intentionally disabled by users. So with all the gloom and doom about how advanced and stealthy attacks have become, and all not being what it seems on the Web, try this. Look over the cube wall or the conference room chair next to you. If you see really big ears and a trunk...you may have found the most obvious security threat in the room…