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When the director of IT at a Boston-based, midsize pharmaceutical firm was first approached to participate in a data leakage audit, he was thrilled. He figured the audit would uncover a few weak spots in the company's data leak defenses and he would then be able to leverage the audit results into funding for additional security resources. "Data leakage is an area that doesn't get a lot of focus until something bad happens. Your biggest hope is that when you raise concerns about data vulnerability, someone will see the value in allowing you to move forward to protect it," the IT director says. But he got way more than he bargained for. The 15-day audit identified 11,000 potential leaks, and revealed gaping holes in the IT team's security practices. (Read a related story on the most common violations encountered.) The audit, conducted by Networks Unlimited in Hudson, Mass., examined outbound e-mail, FTP and Web communications. The targets were leaks of general financial information, corporate plans and strategies, employee and other personal identifiable information, intellectual property and proprietary processes. Networks Unlimited placed one tap between the corporate LAN and the firewall and a second tap between the external e-mail gateway and the firewall. Networks Unlimited used WebSense software on two servers to monitor unencrypted traffic. Then it analyzed the traffic with respect to company policy. Specifically, Networks Unlimited looked for violations of the pharmaceutical firm's internal confidentiality policy, corporate information security policy, Massachusetts Privacy Laws (which go into effect in 2010), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Security and Exchange Commission and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Auditor Jason Spinosa, senior engineer at Networks Unlimited, says that while he selected the criteria for this audit, he usually recommends that companies take time to determine their policy settings based on their risk

The inability to discard worthless items even though they appear to have no value is known as compulsive hoarding syndrome. Ben Rothke explains why it's a bad habit in the world of IT security. The inability to discard worthless items even though they appear to have no value is known as compulsive hoarding syndrome. If the eccentric Collyer brothers had a better understanding of destruction practices, they likely would not have been killed by the very documents and newspapers they obsessively collected. While most organizations don't hoard junk and newspapers like Homer and Langley Collyer did, they do need to keep information such as employee personnel records, financial statements, contracts and leases and more. Given the vast amount of paper and digital media that amasses over time, effective information destruction policies and practices are now a necessary part of doing business and will likely save organizations time, effort and heartache, legal costs as well as embarrassment and more. In December 2007, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $50,000 settlement with American Mortgage Company of Northbrook, Illinois, over charges the company violated the FTC's Disposal, Safeguards, and Privacy rules by failing to properly dispose of documents containing consumers' credit and personally identifiable information. In announcing the settlement, the FTC put all companies on notice that it is taking such failures seriously. A $50,000 settlement might seem low when measured against the potential for financial harm to individuals as a result of the company's negligence, but in addition to the negative PR for American Mortgage, the settlement includes an obligation to obtain an audit, every two years for the next 10 years, from a qualified, independent, third-party professional to ensure that its security program meets the standards of the order. Any similar failures by this company during the next decade will be met with more severe punishment. That, indeed, is a

The Air Force is seeking an entrepreneurial innovator to develop technology to analyze the conduct of insiders to determine if they pose a threat to government IT systems. In a call for proposals aimed at small businesses, posted on Tuesday, the Air Force is asking outside developers to "define, develop and demonstrate innovative approaches for determining 'good' (approved) versus 'bad' (disallowed/subversive) activities, including insiders and/or malware." For their initial efforts, the Air Force will pay up to $100,000. The proposal says current techniques that monitor illicit activities only address the most blatant violations of policy or the grossest deviations from accepted behavior. Most systems concentrate their resources on repelling attacks at the network borders with little attention devoted to threats that evade detection and/or emanate from within. The proposal states: "As such, there currently exists a great need across the federal, military and private sectors for a viable and robust means to provide near-real-time detection, correlation and attribution of network attacks, by content or pattern, without use of reactive previously-seen signatures. Many times, these trusted entities have detailed knowledge about the currently-installed host and network security systems, and can easily plan their activities to subvert these systems."

A former Fannie Mae IT contractor has been indicted for planting a virus that would have nuked the mortgage agency's computers, caused millions of dollars in damages and even shut down operations. How'd this happen? The contractor was terminated, but his server privileges were not. Rajendrasinh Makwana was indicted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Maryland (press report, complaint and indictment PDFs). From early 2006 to Oct. 24, Makwana was a contractor for Fannie Mae. According to the indictment, Makwana allegedly targeted Fannie Mae's network after he was terminated. The goal was to "cause damage to Fannie Mae's computer network by entering malicious code that was intended to execute on January 31, 2009." And given Fannie Mae-along with Freddie Mac-was nationalized in an effort to stabilize the mortgate market Makwana could caused a good bit of havoc. Makwana worked at Fannie Mae's data center in Urbana, MD as a Unix engineer as a contractor with a firm called OmniTech. He had root access to all Fannie Mae servers. The tale of Makwana malware bomb plot is a warning shot to all security teams and IT departments. Given the level of layoffs we've seen lately the ranks of disgruntled former employees is likely to grow. Is there any company NOT lopping off a big chunk of its workforce? And some of these workers may even have Makwana's access privileges and knowledge of the corporate network.