• Search:

The Chief Officers' Network - your business advantage / Management / Risk Professional / The Risk Professional: How quickly do criminal gangs get their hands on data given to an insurance company?

There are limited places that that single-use address can have leaked from: our own servers or our own staff or the insurance company's servers or their own staff.

We often use single use addresses and they do not collect spam during their relatively short lifespan. Therefore we are as certain as we can be that the leak did not happen here.

It's not the first time it has happened: a single use e-mail address handwritten into a government form has become a target for spam from all over the world.

A single use e-mail address put into a letterhead of a circular sent to the MDs of ten banks has also been deluged with spam.

The simple fact is that information leakage is rife.

Even from within financial institutions.

There is little that can be done to stop it save blocking access to data.

We suspect that the culprit in each case was a junior clerk given the job of opening mail or e-mail for his or her boss and simply copying e-mail addresses for sale to criminal gangs.

And that demonstrates that criminal gangs have their tentacles deep into financial institutions and government departments.

Small signs produce worrying results.

After all, if an e-mail address is so easily - and no doubt cheaply - traded, what level of confidentiality can be assured for lists of insured assets, for example?

Bookmark and Share

Tip a friend

Download PDF Download PDF version of this page





loading