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Wow, our group health plan premiums are crushing us. Wait a minute—what if we ramped up our company’s wellness program, using cool technology to help get our workforce in shape? Let’s get all our employees to use those wearable fitness tracker gizmos! We can fold those into our BYOD program, offer a device subsidy, and then have our employees report their stats and progress in some kind of fitness competition, with cool stuff as motivating rewards. Premium costs down, flab down, fitness up, profits up… what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty will go wrong, unless the company takes a breather and checks the pulse of information-related risks and compliance issues. So, let’s run a quick information governance circuit drill.
Continue Reading IG perspective: Are wearable fitness trackers fit for the workplace?

 will be missed, but his wisdom will endure. Who else could have observed “No one goes there nowadays. It’s too crowded”? The information governance equivalent is “No one has information anymore. There’s too much of it.” In the last decade we have witnessed the systemic utilitization of computing power. Data used to be housed predominantly within a company’s own systems, but now, through remote storage, SaaS, PaaS, and other cloud solutions, more and more information is hosted by third-party providers. Also, as marketplace forces compel organizations to leverage or outsource functions that used to reside internally, operational service providers increasingly create, receive, maintain, and process information on the organization’s behalf.

It follows that information governance (the organization’s approach to satisfying information compliance and controlling information risk while maximizing information value) can no longer simply be an internally-focused exercise. IG “has come to a fork in the road, and must take it.” Service provider selection, contracting, and oversight are now primary vehicles of information governance – because when it comes to governing your organization’s information, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
Continue Reading 90% of information governance is half contracting

Do data breaches cause lasting reputational damage for organizations? We all know breach response is expensive –  just ask Target, which posted data breach-related costs of $162 million through fiscal year 2014, plus another $129 million for the first half of FY2015, all net of $90 million in cyber insurance. That’s a lot of zeros, and it’s not over yet. According to Ponemon’s 2015 Cost of Data Breach study, the average U.S. cost of a “malicious or criminal breach” is $230 per compromised record, $210 per record for a “system glitch” breach, and $198 per record for “human error” breaches. The U.S. breaches in the study averaged more than 28,000 compromised records and an average total cost of over $6.5 million.

But beyond response hard costs, the X factor for many companies is a fear of crippling reputational damage in the wake of a large-scale data breach. As it turns out, such fears may be unfounded, and may also be unhelpful.
Continue Reading Will you still love me tomorrow, post-breach?

At DEF CON you’ll often hear that “every company is receiving penetration testing, but some companies pay for the pleasure.” My take is that every company pays for penetration testing – some companies pay in planned expenditures, but others pay in response costs, reputation loss, business interruption, legal liability, and increased insurance premiums. Or as Claus Moser observed, “Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”

Last week’s DEF CON post shared insights from DEF CON 23 presenters on the fast-moving threat environment. Below are post-DEF CON observations on strengthening an organization’s cyber risk management strategy.
Continue Reading DEF CON 23—Part II: cyber risk management strategy

Faces lit by computers, the hackers’ objectives were clear — attack and defend. At this year’s DEF CON, the largest hacker convention in the United States, pre-qualified teams of hackers from around the globe faced-off in a network-security simulation that combined network sniffing, cryptanalysis, programming, reverse-engineering, and other tactics that would make Lisbeth Salander blush. Back in 1993, the first DEF CON had roughly 100 participants. This year, badges dangled from the necks of nearly 20,000 attendees, including hackers, lawyers, academics, journalists, and government officials.

DEF CON has an edgy narrative — it’s notorious for criminal exploits, wild parties, and Mohawk-fitted outcasts. But that story line is much too simple. And “too simple” is what security researchers—or hackers, depending on your sensibilities—proclaim after they expose the vulnerabilities in products and infrastructure we rely on daily.

Below are highlights and insights from presentations at DEF CON 23 that illustrate the evolving cyber risks and policy dilemmas facing governments, individuals, and the private sector.
Continue Reading DEF CON 23—Part I: Hackers highlight evolving cyber threats

“Sorry.” Music service Spotify joins the club as the latest company to apologize to its customers for proposed privacy policy changes. When it comes to bad press, it would be tough to beat Minecraft-founder Markus Persson’s tweet about Spotify: “Hello. As a consumer, I’ve always loved your service. You’re the reason I stopped pirating music. Please consider not being evil.” Spotify promptly threw itself on the mercy of its customers in a short written apology.

While the scope of Spotify’s policy exceeds the scope of data that most companies seek to obtain, it’s a good reminder for all companies to review their own privacy policies. As a company reviews its privacy policy, it should consider these key questions:
Continue Reading Sorry seems to be the hardest word – updating your privacy policy

Costs continue to mount for Target as the company works to put its massive 2013 data breach behind it. Target and Visa recently announced an agreement for Target to reimburse Visa card issuers as much as $67 million for costs associated with the historic breach. The settlement is considerably larger, and more likely to succeed, than the proposed $19 million deal between Target and MasterCard that issuers previously rejected as too low.
Continue Reading Target update: still shopping, but no end in sight

Old-school company intranets are like soooo boring. Why not juice things up? Sure, we’ll keep the one-directional content (employee policies, company announcements, etc.), but let’s add a dynamic platform for employee interactive training modules, capturing employee responses and quiz results. Why stop there – how about a message board for employees, to turn dull company communications into an energized conversation? And in today’s mobile world, shouldn’t we enable remote access from anywhere our employees happen to be, 24/7? What could possibly go wrong?

Well … a whole lot will go wrong, unless the company first applies an information governance perspective. So let’s ask a few questions to explore what information risks and compliance issues are at play.
Continue Reading IG perspective: adding social media to workplace websites

Ah, Federalism. In countless ways we benefit from a system in which individual states can express their respective policy interests in differing state laws, with the resulting quilt bound together by the Constitution, federal law, and judicial interpretation. But on some topics we end up with a “crazy quilt” … and PII breach notification is trending crazy.

Since 2002, when California enacted the seminal state law mandating notification of individuals whose personally identifiable information (PII) is breached, virtually every state has followed suit. Forty-seven states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands now have such statutes.  Only Alabama, New Mexico, and South Dakota are without one, and under Texas’ statute, companies doing business in Texas that have a PII breach must follow the Texas notification requirements for affected residents of these three states.

These laws are triggered by the affected individual’s residency, not where the breach occurred. So, when an organization with employees or customers in many states suffers a data breach, it must comply with a wide variety of differing and potentially conflicting state breach notification laws. And differ and conflict they do, as the following three examples illustrate.
Continue Reading State breach notification laws: the quilt is getting crazier

The Target data breach disrupted the 2013 holiday shopping season, shook the retail industry, and shocked many who assumed that a nationwide retailer would have the security controls in place to prevent such an attack. The breach exposed credit card data of 40 million individuals and personal data of approximately 70 million consumers. A quarter billion dollars and a slew of lawsuits later, lessons have emerged and questions remain.
Continue Reading Taking stock of the Target data breach