Could this happen to you?

Many of us are not concerned about information security because we don't believe that accidents can really happen to us. We are smarter, more careful, or luckier than everyone else. But are we really? Below are just a few of the stories that have happened to real people in real organizations. Could you be next?

• An employee a large international consulting firm had a laptop stolen from his car. The laptop contained hundreds of thousands of personal records of IBM employees.
• During the legal proceedings of the Enron litigation, thousands of data files were used as evidence. During and after the discovery process, many of these files were posted on the internet. Suddenly, the most personal email between former Enron employees and their friends and lovers was available for everyone to see.
• A British woman suffered international embarrassment when her boyfriend forwarded her explicit sexual e-mail to 10 million readers in England, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, and the US.
• An employee of a large pharmaceutical company accidentally exposed information on over 10,000 customers by running peer-to-peer file sharing software on a laptop used at work and at home.
• An employee of the Veteran's Administration took home and lost a laptop computer with the personal health records of millions of US military veterans.
• An employee of a large university accidentally sent a spreadsheet as an email attachment which contained the personal records of thousands of students.
• An employee of a restaurant chain was fired when he posted pictures of himself drinking and partying on his personal page of a popular social networking site.

MySecurityIQ is sponsored in part by Information Shield, a leading provider of information security publications, including Information Protection Made Easy.