Online games, businesses all over the world, various governments, and many other interest groups continue to give out reminders, guidelines, and maybe even pamphlets explaining how and why you should keep your information safe and any other important information safe. They tell you to not hand out your passwords like candy on Halloween, have progressively more confusing ones, and not to put important baseline information where others can easily access it.
But as each year goes by accounts get hacked, security fails, and people keep clicking dodgy links in their emails. It’s surprising how much time and effort is spent getting the latest and greatest virus and malware protection only to have technological stone age techniques defeat it because somebody didn’t dispose of information correctly.
When security fails and the failure is studied it helps security improve by finding the problem and remedying it. This technique also applies to Personal Security or PerSec as it is dubbed in some circles. Personal Security applies to a wide variety of things about the individual from physical safety to their virtual security. In this wide spectrum we find personal information security.
I came across a personal security infraction recently. Not a big one, but if I was a much less moral man I could have used it to the fullest extent. It was a small treasure trove of information that might have seemed harmless but would have provided valuable data that combined with other information could be used on a much grander scale.
I’m used to hearing stories about poorly disposed information, ranging from documents to whole servers being tossed into the trash. I generally thought that I was too far from civilization to witness something like this but I was wrong. I went to drop off some recycling at the local recycling spot. Now this bin is generally very full or near empty whenever I come to it and it’s a fun little exercise to see what people had decided to get rid of. This recent trip I found shoved into the giant bin, in plain view of anyone who was looking in the right spot, was a small stack of papers and document envelopes. I estimate it was smaller than a full ream of paper.
I picked up a few of the pages and they were definitely from someone’s personal business accounts. It was a graph of products sold by a particular family in the local economy. Times of sale, amount of product, cost of product, price fluctuations, and even to whom the product was sold. All this on about thirty pieces of paper. It would be bad enough if the information was a decade or so old but it was dated within the last year or two. The closed envelope could have help even more important information.
The data held within those pages could have been used to get important financial and personal information. Identity theft, fraud, any of a number of things could have resulted from that information being taken from the trash.
Even if I have important documents or just documents in general that I need to get rid of, I make them irretrievable. They get burned completely, and some times they get shredded beforehand. I have a small stack of documents that I no longer need and I will take a handful, go to my personal disposal area, and hand feed them to the fire to ensure that they are completely ash. Are the documents absolutely important? You don’t need to know. Do you have account information laying around? I don’t need to know. If it has your name, social security number, or even your passwords or physical address, you should not just dump it into the trash or recycling.
I passed up a huge data mine by not picking up those pages. I had considered doing the previous owners of the papers a favor and take and dispose of their information properly but I decided against it. It’s not my circus and those certainly were not my monkeys.
People seem to continually forget how much data and information can cost them. How ell it can be used by certain groups or individuals. Because of this they leave themselves completely open to trouble and when it finally come they are surprised that it did.
Keep your information and data safe.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 