In the first part of this article series, we discussed why it is so important to protect your business data, including the first two steps in the protection process. Once you have resolved the underlying human issues behind data theft, the remaining five steps will help you begin protecting the technological weaknesses common to many businesses.
Businesses often make social engineering (or fraud) training boring! And that’s bad for your bottom line, because no one ends up remembering how to protect your organization against threats like data theft, corporate espionage or social networking exposure.
Too often, fraud and social engineering workshops cover just the concepts that define fraud rather than the feelings that signal it’s actually in process at the moment. The key to training your executives, employees and even customers on fraud is to let them experience what it feels like to be conned. In other words, they need to actually be socially engineered (manipulated into giving away their own private information) several times throughout the training so that they begin to reflexively sense fraud as it is happening. Like learning to throw a ball, there is no substitute for doing it for yourself. Fraud detection is similar; it takes actually doing it (or having it done to you) to fully understand the warning signs. Anything less will leave your audience yawning and uneducated.
Just for a minute, put yourself in the shoes of Anthony Weiner. You’ve done something exceptionally stupid, whether it’s sending sexually explicit photos of yourself to strangers you don’t even know, or another unrelated mistake. To compound the stupidity, you involve social networking – you Facebook or tweet or YouTube the act – or even simply email details of what you’ve done.
Everyone of us makes impulsively bad decisions (probably not as bad as Weiner, but bad nonetheless). Prior to the internet, you at least had a chance to recover from your past transgressions, as there wasn’t a readily accessible public record of the act unless you happened to be caught on tape (think Nixon, Rodney King, etc.). But now that pretty much every human carries either a camera or video recorder with them at all times (mobile phones), can communicate instantly with a massive audience (Facebook, Twitter, SMS, blogs), and have access to more information than exists in the Library of Congress just by pulling up Google, the equation of how you control sensitive information about yourself has changed radically. Every stranger (and even friend) is like a full service news station with video, distribution and commentary, just waiting to report on your missteps.
Some readers might not know that I was a two-time victim of identity theft for losses of more than $300,000. That is the reason I wrote Stolen Lives and that I am now a professional identity theft speaker. I don’t promote my services any more than necessary on my blog (I leave that to my commercial website which deals with my profession as an identity theft speaker and expert). Quite often, however, I have blog readers requesting to see a preview video of my speaking. To satisfy that request, I’ll post a copy of my identity theft speaker preview video below. By the way, I learned the value of linking my YouTube videos, my blog and my website from an amazing SEO guy named Steve Mertz. Check out his SEO advice.
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