ADM 316 - Workshop 5 Final Postscript

Class, here is the PowerPoint presentation from our final night of class. In addition, I may ask some of you if it is okay with you to publish your final presentations for use as examples for future classes. I’ll let you know once I review them again.

I enjoyed teaching your class and wish you all the best of luck in your future studies with Indiana Wesleyan!

Even Those We Trust Can’t Be Trusted With Privacy Data

Here are a few examples:

• A postal worker on Long Island was arrested after he stole credit cards from his customers’ mail and ran up a tab on them.
• LendingTree.com informed its customers that a group of former employees shared confidential passwords with lenders that were unaffiliated with LendingTree and accessed data such as names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, income and employment information. 
• A couple in Minnesota were posting personal ads on Craigslist for sexual encounters and then stealing identities, checks, and credit card information to purchase merchandise and prescription drugs.

Who do you / can you trust in these days of rampant identity theft? As we’ve been discussing in class, there are a lot of ways that you can safeguard yourself–you just have to be vigilant.

ADM 316 - Workshop 4 Postscript

Class, here are the slides from last night’s workshop:

Also, the university will be coming at the beginning of class to pick up your loaner laptops, so please make sure that you bring them to class and get any homework assignments, your PowerPoints for the class presentation, or other files off of there before you turn them in.

Patients’ Data Stolen, Hospital Says

Even when you think that your data is safe from hackers, there are always other people who have access to your private identity information.

An employee of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan stole information from the records of as many as 40,000 patients, a hospital spokeswoman said on Friday.

The theft — which occurred over the past several years and included patients’ names, phone numbers and Social Security numbers — was discovered during a federal investigation, and the hospital was notified in January, the spokeswoman, Myrna Manners, said. An internal audit by the hospital confirmed the theft, she said.

The hospital does not believe that any medical information was stolen, Ms. Manners said, adding that there is no evidence that the stolen information has been used.

Investigators were looking into the possibility that the theft could be part of a larger criminal scheme, Ms. Manners said.

How do you stop this? Ummmm… maybe stop going to the doctor? As stated earlier in the course, a computer is a tool. How the tool is used is what’s the issue… you can’t stop bad guys from trying to be bad, but you can protect the information enough so that it makes it more difficult for the bad guys to get away with being bad.

When a Thief Steals Your Tax Refund

In honor of Tax Day, here is some happy news:

Earlier this week, one of my colleagues sat down at her computer to file her income tax return electronically using TurboTax. Twice, her return was rejected. The message she got back was startling: the IRS already had a tax return filed under her Social Security number.

How could this be? She hadn’t filed yet.

Panicked, she called the Social Security Administration to make sure her name matched her Social Security number. It did. Then she called the IRS. A representative pulled up the tax return filed under her name and Social Security number, and asked to verify the address. It wasn’t hers.

A thief had filed a fraudulent tax return under her name, and would likely get her $1,000 refund, not to mention her $600 economic stimulus payment. Thus began her tedious task of clearing her name: filing a police report, filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, putting a fraud alert on her credit report and mailing in her tax return with copies of her driver’s license, police report and other documents to prove her identity. (Read here for steps you should take if you’re a victim of identity theft).

Despite the growing problems, the audit found that the IRS doesn’t do enough to prevent the problem or prosecute those who commit these crimes. It found: “No action is taken to stop someone from continuing to commit employment-related identity theft using another person’s SSN and name. The IRS does not actively try to identify or stop an individual from committing identity theft.”

Google Sued Over Street View

While preparing for class tomorrow night, it reminded me of this article I read earlier in the week about a couple who is suing Google for violating their privacy rights. However, this seems to go beyond the usual satellite imagery that is present in most of the pictures you would find on Google Earth.

The suit targets the company over images on its website, which allows users to find street-level photos by clicking on a map. To gather the photos, Google uses vehicles with mounted digital cameras to take pictures up and down the streets of major metropolitan areas. The Borings say the images of their home on the Google site had to be taken from their long driveway, labeled “Private Road,” and that violated their privacy.

“There’s no merit to this action,” Google spokesman Larry Yu said… He said Google has links on the website that let property owners request that such images be removed if they cite a good reason and can confirm they own the property depicted. Yu also said that if the Borings made such a request to Google, he is confident that the image would be removed.

At first, I thought this was a cash grab against the company, but they are really only asking for $25,000 in damages. So, here’s the question: how close is too close before it becomes uncomfortable that people are going to see your trampoline and your 3-car garage on the internet? Is Big Brother watching you? I suppose the only thing that would have made the story better was somebody in the picture sitting in a hot tub out back with a beer in their hand or something like that. Oh, wait… maybe it already happened.

SlideShare

During my last course, I learned about this web site called SlideShare where you can post PowerPoint presentations that can be embedded in blogs and accessed online without needing to use PowerPoint. If you go to this link, you can see them there. I’ve also updated the postscript posts and embedded the presentations in there.

How to Be a Bully in the MySpace / YouTube Generation

I guess this might be a bit off-topic for the subject of data security this week, but one of the things I like to pursue in this class are how ethics apply to information technology. You’ve probably heard of this incident in the last couple of days where a young girl in Florida allegedly said some unkind things about her friends on MySpace, so her “friends” retaliated by videotaping themselves beating her into unconsciousness and threatening to post the beating on MySpace and YouTube.

Here’s another link to the story from NBC’s The Today Show. with other cyberbullying links in the article.

ADM 316 - Workshop 2 Postscript

Here are the PowerPoint slides from last night:

RSS Syndication

Actually, there’s a redundancy in that title. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, and whenever you’re on a web site and see that funky orange icon to the right, you know that web site syndicates its contents. Most often you will see these on blogs (blogs, short for weblogs, are online diaries… you’re reading one right now!).

However, with the explosion of the blogosphere (which is a fancy way of saying that people spend too much time at work reading and writing on blogs), I guess people got tired of having to waste time visiting 60 blogs during the day and only wanted to know when there was new content to view.