Wednesday, September 30, 2009

bank sues google over mis-mailed info!?!

Well, it seems that Rocky Mountain Bank had one of its employees email a gmail account with names, addresses, and social security numbers of its customers. They sued Google to reveal the identity and shut down the account.

I'll start with: what?!? A bank emailed a random gmail account with confidential information?!?

From one of the articles below: a customer asked the bank to email loan documents to a third party gmail address. The wrong gmail address was emailed. An additional document was accidentally included.

It sounds like the employee kept the customers files in the same folder as the banks internal files. At least I imagine that the customer called and said, "hey, can you email those files to x@gmail.com?", the bank employee created an email and selected the files from a folder and selected one too many.
  1. You shouldn't do business with third parties that have a gmail account. You can't be sure who you are dealing with. Banks especially should not, but it sounds like this was the bank's customer who was dealing with the third party.
  2. You shouldn't be emailing confidential information. Or at least you shouldn't email it unencrypted.
  3. When emailing files, you should make sure you have the right ones included. If you work with confidential data, double-check for sure. And triple-check and why doesn't their IT department have a verification process for approving outgoing email with attachments?!?
  4. You should keep different classes of data in separate places. You put confidential papers in a safe. You put weapons in a safe location. You put valuables in a safe deposit box. All because it's more difficult to do something stupid with them if they are in a special location. (hmm, makes me think of holiness) If you left your birth certificate on your desk, you might accidentally throw it out. If you have files that should never, in any case, be emailed outside the bank, don't keep them in the same folder. Or at least encrypt them.
To sum up, an employee mailed a confidential document to the wrong email address. It's sort of like telling the bank to pay the electric company $80 and they give some random person $100,000 of everyone's money instead.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/google_sued_for_gmail_user_identity/

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-09-24-n14.html

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220100410&cid=tab_art_int_C

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=114264

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220300364

Monday, August 24, 2009

wal-mart bags

I cleaned out my closet recently. If I had guessed before cleaning it, I would have said I had 3 or 4 Wal-Mart bags in there. Turns out there were a lot more. I found 40 of them hiding in there.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

saggy pants

cute.

http://www.news-journal.com/hp/content/news/stories/2009/04/09/04092009_dress_ordinance.html

Sunday, January 11, 2009

house closed

and a status update on the house. It finally closed the Monday after the closing date. The title company didn't call me like I asked them to, however, and I didn't find out till calling them a week later.

Status Update

My cat continues to fear the vacuum cleaner. While I admire her evasion skills, it is clear to me now why her species has failed to rule the planet or even make a significant impact upon it.

Friday, December 19, 2008

house take 374

and the house is still not closed yet.  One of the notaries forgot to sign her documents...  No comment...  lol

Thursday, December 18, 2008

closing on house

Today I will close on the house that should have closed in Sept.  It has been a long time...

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

slow cat

my spotted frostsaber can only run 6 kph (or about 3.75 mph). Seems kind of slow to me.

annoying software

most I agree with:

http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-3513_11-202392.html