Chris Mosby at myITforum.com

How much is your data worth?

Tuesday September 25, 2007 at 11:09 am CST
Posted by Allysa Myers

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Apparently P2P is the place to find information these days, especially highly confidential information. There have been two particularly interesting and high-profile cases of P2P clients being improperly configured such that important company data has been placed on P2P networks. I found one paragraph of the second article particularly interesting:

In July, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard testimony from several witnesses about how everything from classified military documents to corporate data can be found on P2P networks. The leaked documents on P2P networks cited as examples at the hearing included the Pentagon’s entire secret backbone network infrastructure diagram; contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to defeat improvised explosive devices in Iraq; and physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities.

This tells me there are still a large number of companies that are still explicitly or implicitly allowing file-sharing programs in their environments, or they’re allowing employees to take highly sensitive documents outside of their environment. This would seem to imply they consider their data to be of relatively low value, even if it could put lives or livelihoods at risk.

Contrast this with the average home user who doesn’t regularly deal with highly confidential data - what do you suppose they figure is the value of their personal data, compared with confidential government documents? What do you suppose the odds are of them taking higher precautions with their data than a government site?

What will be the watershed event that causes people to understand that their data has value? Will there be a “Melissa virus” of data loss?

Source: Computer Security Research - McAfee Avert Labs Blog