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Between January and April of this year, Giang filled out 382 surveys before the company that was paying for them, StayWell, figured out what was going on. StayWell had been offering UC employees the gift vouchers as incentives to fill out health surveys, but it grew wise to the scam.

Giang only used part of the Social Security numbers of his co-workers while filling out the survey, his lawyer states in a sentencing memorandum. "Mr Giang never intended to steal their identity, and other than losing the opportunity to participate in StayWell's marketing surveys, the victims did not lose anything," says the Oct. 20 memorandum asking the judge for probation instead of jail time.

best practices are being swept under the rug. Only 31 percent of respondents archived according to HIPPA recommendations

Another third stored archives in a single data center and only slightly more (36 percent) stored archives in datacenters located less than 100 miles apart.

Hosted solutions offer an attractive alternative to the healthcare industry. Such solutions ease the burden on in-house IT, which is typically characterized by few people, limited dollars and huge workloads.

"Three-fourths of businesses are deleting files, reformatting or destroying drives, or 'do not know' how they are erasing sensitive data. Deleting files from a hard drive only marks the files to be rewritten, which may never occur. Furthermore, reformatting the drive only removes the entries in the index or table of contents that point to the data. And, physically destroying a drive is not a guaranteed method of protection, as Kroll Ontrack has been recovering data from severely damaged drives, such as the Columbia space shuttle, for more than 25 years.

"Surveying more than 1,500 participants from 12 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regarding their data wiping practices also revealed that four in 10 businesses gave away their used hard drive to another individual and 22 percent do not know what happened to their old computer.

Only 19 percent of businesses deploy data eraser software and fewer, 6 percent, use a degausser to erase media. When asked if and how businesses verify their data has been deleted, very few (16 percent) reported relying on a product or service report to confirm all of their data had been wiped.

“If this assessment demonstrates anything, it's that IT and security departments have got to gain greater visibility over all of their security and compliance activities and take steps to better understand and manage them.”

An even greater number, 66 percent, would be prepared to work for lower pay if a job offered more flexibility, at least when compared with a better-paid job without such flexibility. Businesses are uncertain about the move to home working, mainly because of security. According to the Cisco survey, they should also factor in some of the advantages. Almost half of those employees who do work from home reckon they put in between two and three extra work hours per day as a result.

Employees' dislike of offices is nothing new but what has changed is that it is now technically possible to make an employee productive without asking them to travel to a building every day.

It seems just as likely that the death of the office, predicted many times in the last 40 years, might be as much about the changing economics of work than any desire of employees to escape to the back room and the VPN.

Growing scrutiny of cloud computing security in the first half of this year is not surprising in light of the numerous data breaches, privacy issues and headline grabbing cloud outages that have occurred recently

The 26-page survey report returned a stunning conclusion – though one not surprising to those familiar with legal contracting for cloud computing; namely that a majority of cloud providers do not believe data security is their responsibility - but the customer’s. 

The results indicate that "there are more cloud implementations within the enterprise than people were aware of," Jay Fry, vice president of marketing for the cloud computing division at CA Technologies, told eWEEK. The report indicates that IT administrators are starting to get some visibility on what the various groups within the organization are working on, he said. As more people begin to discuss the cloud within the enterprise, the visibility will continue to improve, said Fry.

In the past, there were "rogue deployments" that the company’s IT staff didn’t even know about, because the individual line of business was purchasing software-as-a-service offerings without involving IT.

Collaboration tools such as hosted e-mail, antivirus and spam filtering and Web conferencing software accounted for a bulk of cloud deployments, at 75 percent, according to the report

Small business owners' cybersecurity policies and actions are not adequate enough to ensure the safety of their employees, intellectual property and customer data, according to the 2009 National Small Business Cybersecurity Study. The study, co-sponsored by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Symantec [Nasdaq: SYMC], as part of this year's National Cyber Security Awareness Month, surveyed nearly 1,500 small business owners across the United States about their cybersecurity awareness policies and practices.

The survey shows discrepancies between needs and actions regarding security policies and employee education on security best practices.

The study found that while more than 9 in 10 small businesses said they believe they are safe from malware and viruses based on the security practices they have in place, only 53 percent of firms check their computers on a weekly basis to ensure that anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewalls and operating systems are up-to-date and 11 percent never check them.

The Deloitte Forensic Center’s analysis of the E-Discovery: Mitigating Risk Through Better Communication survey results1 identified three interrelated challenges. They are: Communication Awareness Readiness

At the heart of e-discovery are two corporate functions that historically have had little in common, and tend to speak their own technical languages: legal and IT

Neither can be truly effective in the e-discovery process without a clear understanding of the other, yet communication and coordination between these two departments appears to be unclear to many survey participants: More than one-third of respondents (36 percent) don’t know the answer to how their legal and IT departments communicate.

AVG's research shows that: * 83% agree that having the right level of IT security protection is critical to their business * 77% say that a security threat could have a significant negative impact on their business * 55% feel they can make IT security decisions without 3rd party influence * However, only 48% have a clear IT security policy in place for their staff, leaving most at the mercy of what employees decide to download or access online * As a result, perhaps not surprisingly, 1 in 4 have experienced a security breach * Most worryingly, 1 in 7 have no security software or systems in place at all AVG also asked small businesses whether they expect to see growth in the next five years - 61% of UK and 74% of US small businesses say that they do.

As of April 2010, only about 7% of small-business owners were using cloud services, but that number is expected to grow to more than 10% by mid-2011, according to a survey by technology-research firm IDC.

Half of small firms that use "the cloud" say it has improved their bottom line, according to a survey this fall by Microsoft Corp., which provides cloud services.

A number of surveys show that some business owners are hesitant to try cloud computing because they don't want to stray from familiar systems or invest in new ones. Some owners that have made the switch, however, say it has been a boon to their cash-strapped firms.

Senior compliance officers at more than 100 leading U.S. companies responded to 28 questions in four key areas critical for the compliance function: leadership, reporting relationships and structure; compliance function scope, focus and risk; metrics to gauge program effectiveness; and budget, staffing and resources. A major finding of the study: One of the biggest obstacles facing Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) is measuring the effectiveness of their compliance functions - almost 40 percent of the companies surveyed said they make no attempt to measure the effectiveness of their compliance program.

“An effective compliance program is the cornerstone of cooperation credit allowed under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and stakeholders are demanding much higher transparency in how compliance risk is effectively managed,” said Miles Everson, PwC principal and global and U.S. risk and compliance leader.

“Without a clear measure of the compliance department’s effectiveness, much else is in jeopardy. Lacking this,

"Our research shows that the healthcare industry is struggling to protect sensitive medical information, putting patients at risk of medical identity fraud and costing hospitals and other healthcare services companies millions in annual breach-related costs," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute.  "At this point one would hope to see that healthcare organizations have improved information security practices and come into compliance with HITECH, now that it's been more than one year since it was enacted.  Instead we found enormous vulnerabilities.  The protection of patient data should be at the forefront of their efforts."

ey findings of the research: Data breaches are costing the healthcare system billions.  The total economic burden created by data breaches on the healthcare industry is nearly $6 billion annually.  The impact of a data breach over a two-year period is approximately $2 million per organization and the lifetime value of a lost patient is $107,580.  The average organization had 2.4 data breach incidents over the past two years.  Major factors causing data breaches are unintentional employee action, lost or stolen computing devices and third-party error.Healthcare organizations are not protecting patient data.  Organizations have little or no confidence in their ability to appropriately secure patient records (58 percent).  Healthcare organizations have inadequate resources (71 percent) and insufficient policies and procedures in place (69 percent) to prevent and quickly detect patient data loss.Protecting patient data is not a priority.  Seventy percent of hospitals stated that protecting patient data is not a top priority.  Patient billing (35 percent) and medical records (26 percent) are the most susceptible to data loss or theft.  A majority of organizations have less than two staff dedicated to data protection management (67 percent).HITECH has exposed the healthcare industry's lax data protection practices rather than improved the safety of patient records.  The majority (71 percent) of respondents do not believe the HITECH Act regulations have significantly changed the management practices of patient records.  The findings indicate that there is a significant number of data breaches that go undetected, and therefore unreported.

"We talk with healthcare compliance people dealing with data breach risks every day and they just can't get their arms around the problem of data exposure," said Rick Kam, president and co-founder of ID Experts.  "Unfortunately, in healthcare organizations, patient revenue trumps risk management."