leak – TechVirtuoso

Why you shouldn’t leak the CONFIDENTIAL memos your CEO sends out

November 11th, 2010 at 12:16 PM 4 Comments Michael Stanclift

So you’ve got a really great job as an engineer for Google, and it just got better because the CEO sent the entire company an email letting everyone know how much he appreciated them and that they’d be getting a 10% raise and a $1,000 cash bonus. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

You decide to let the rest of the world know how great your job is, and how great your CEO is for giving you a raise by sending the email to the press. The press, jumps on it, talking up how great Google is for giving their all their employees an across the board raise in such harsh economic time, etc, etc.

One small problem. That email you forwarded to the press. Yeah, that was confidential.

More specifically:

CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY
GOOGLERS ONLY (FULL TIME AND PART TIME EMPLOYEES)

Eric tracked you down, and guess what. You’re fired.

I’m not sure what Google’s reasoning for doing so was, but it happened. And it should prove as a lesson not to be so direct about forwarding company communications to the press. The funny thing though, is that the news about the leaker being fired, probably came from a leak within Google.

via Business Insider, CNN Money

Data breach at University of Hawaii exposes 40,000 alumni records

November 1st, 2010 at 11:13 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Aloha unencrypted social security numbers!

A faculty member at the University of Hawaii Manoa is to blame for exposing nearly 40,000 alumni to identity theft, by posting their grades, birth dates, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information on an unencrypted web server since November 30, 2009.

Students who attended the university between 1990 and 1998 and also in 2001, or the West Oahu campus during the fall of 1994 or between 1998 and 1993, were subject to the data spillage.

The FBI and the local police are investigating, although the university said in a statement they had no reason to believe the faculty member at fault committed the act with any malice. At the same school, over the summer, nearly 53,000 records including 40,000 SSNs were exposed an a similar way from the school’s parking department.

via CRN