Sheesh...
What ever happened to trust between an employee and the employer?
Re: Can an iPod bring down your company?
If my company told me that I could no longer have my iPod in with me at work, I'd leave it in my car. If they began to tell me that I couldn't even have one on the grounds, I'd think it was time to look for other employment.
It's coming around again to be an employee's market. Be careful about how you treat those who do the actual work for your company. If you piss them off and they leave, your bottom line will also leave with them.
Latest software headlines from Network World:
Kernel developers, Wall Street to come together
Zoho launches e-mail app with offline, mobile access
|
Does Verizon's Voyager stack up to the iPhone? |
|
|
5 IT skills that won't boost your salary 
[1,407]
Women 4 times more likely than men to cough up personal info [589]
Japan's 10 funniest tech-related commercials [Videos] [407]
Throwing away a promo CD is "unauthorized distribution"? [1,265]
Adults too quick to dismiss educational video games [682]
Attack of the iPhone clones [Slideshow] [578]
10 things IT needs to know about AJAX [1,258]
This Year's 25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries [Slideshow] [409]
|
|
The iPod is the threat? How
The iPod is the threat? How many companies let their employees walk out the door with a laptop? How many let employees visit SSL secured websites. These are equally possible avenues of data theft.
Of course, it's a less sensational "story".
RE: The iPod is the threat? How
What? Did you not read the article??
People with laptop's are usually entrusted with those devices...they sign IT policies or their system's are locked down to prevent them from extracting data. This does not mean that you let your entire network ALSO be another unsecure security hole! Whether it's an iPod or a damn usb flash disk or even a digital camera... you lock them down altogether.
Either you know this already and focused on a single point of the article (iPod is a storage device and you're trying to say it's not the ONLY type of storage device) or you're a non-IT ignoramus.
The point of the article is clear.
By the way DeviceLock is a million times better then any software I have ever found for this purpose. Now lock down or control printing, email and internet activity and THEN you have minimized much of the threat.
Whenever I see someone tout
Whenever I see sompone tout a product as 1E6 times better than anything else, I smell vested interest. This is clearly the case of a solution looking for a problem. The spectre of all those IPODs out there is supposed to strike fear into the hearts of IT managers and losen corporate purse strings.
The most typical "IT Ignoramous" employee is someone like a clerk, order entry person, low level bureaucrat, etc without direct electronic access to sensitive information anyway.
I can't imagine a non defense related company giving middle/upper managers, sales people, engineers, etc that have access to sensitive data "locked down" PCs, so they can't share information while on the road, or even email pcitures of their last vacation to a coworker.
As far as the IT gurus at the company, they are the most likely to defeat protections - if they have the inclination.
Well, there you go then..
Well, there you go then.. there's that difference. Our laptops and PC's are locked down tight and if the end user requires "admin" access we remotely take care of the problem if they're on the road. Should they require data to share, we take care of it before they leave. Also, low level employees will come across sensitive material all the time through internal email or other means, most especially "clerks". Your level of security all depends on your organization and the cooperation of the upper managment...
As for DeviceLock, call it what you will, I'm just telling you it works for us...
Nature of the assertion - NextSentry
Please excuse my commentary as CTO of NextSentry. We are only 10x better... Kidding ;)
The issue is not about trust it’s about accountability. The point we were trying to make was that if someone walks in with a removable hard drive, it looks suspicious. If you walk in with an IPOD (or any similar device) there is not the inherent association of risk.
I don't agree with playing the network Natzi and locking everything down, or restricting someone to a thin-client shell. Under this approach we often drive users to more elusive means (i.e. hard copy print outs), or leave select users with legitimate business need to continue to operate in complete transparency.
Not to be self serving here, but our vision is actually to be an enabling technology, so you don't have to shut down all the access to different ports or devices. Our objective is simply to reduce the risk associated with data that is moved thorough such means(content analysis), and to do so in a holistic fashion across the end point, including the aforementioned vectors (SSL encrypted web sites, email, printing, or general laptop usage).
Sam Fleming
Natzi?
Sam,
If you are commenting as the CTO of a company in an official capacity and really must use the word "Nazi" as an adjective, at least spell Nazi correctly so you don't make yourself and your company look foolish. As a Jewish-American I am more than a little offended by the term myself, but to each their own. Why not just use it in your marketing collateral?
Here it appears that all of the comments are from companies who happen to have a product that solves the problem. The article itself appears to have been paid for by NextSentry and most of the comments are from their Russian competitor DeviceLock. Why not list all of the companies in this space? GFI, SecureWave, DeviceWall, Safend... We have reviewed most of these, but I am not going to tell you which one we chose. The best thing to do is try all of them, look at the pricing and more importantly establish a policy regarding their usage.
iPods have been around since 2001. USB flash drives have been around even longer. Removable media devices don't steal data, people do. An endpoint security solution is only one part of the component. If you have untrustworthy employees then no software , hardware, "network nazi", or other mechanism will keep them from stealing data, anymore than I can keep people from stealing my stapler.
>Our objective is simply to
>Our objective is simply to reduce the risk >associated with data that is moved thorough such >means(content analysis)
Is this a joke ? What is to stop someone recording your precious data on a recordable CD, the burners of which are no ubiquitous in office environments ?
more than iPod
I totally agree. In typical IT policies in companies they ban any type of removable storage device from accessing the network (iPod is classified as such a device). That will prevent misc viruses and an urge for a pissed off employee to take company information.
This story is ridiculous and the answer is plain and simple. Apple is the scapegoat because of the name and the "story", but it should be understood by employees and companies not to bring any device in the building that can become a threat.
That way, it makes things easier on the IT staff so they don't have to babysit they employees more than they have to.
Yeah, I did
TFA said that physical and/or software locks were too complicated for your average IT site, so an iPod ban was smarter. As you say, they're not really, and I say, it's not.
TFA also ignored the fact that a ban on having an iPod, because it is not related to actual security risks, is an opportunity to be sued for wrongful termination if a firm were to be so stupid as to attempt enforcement.
Too bad that "social engineering" has acquired a negative connotation of theft. Some positive social engineering is obviously called for, perhaps with hardware/software solutions, any time such a draconian policy is suggested. Security freaks, who do not understand ordinary human beings or today's HR environment, should not be in charge.
Almost all MP3 players have
Almost all MP3 players have the capability to act as a repository for copying and removing data, not just iPods from Apple. The question really is how do we as managers of corporate technology address the possession of devices of this sort and more importantly end point security. And then at what level of the organization. For us all plant supervisory and lower staff are not allowed to have any device of this type, that's policy. Also we monitor for the connection of a removable media device to terminals or PC's. But with cell phones, media players and flash drives how do you stop it with out using some sort of end point control, you can't.