HTCIA (High Technology Crimes Association) Meeting Summary
Posted by Michael Kiefer on Fri, Sep 24, 2010
After spending time and presenting at the International HTCIA (High Technology Crimes Association) conference in Atlanta this week, my belief is even stronger that executives of our most 
valued corporations still do not understand two key points: First, that reputation is important and valued and second that more harmful acts can happen outside the corporations monitored perimeter than inside the perimeter (firewalls).
To the first point, both the corporate security personal and investigators at the conference had little or no knowledge of threats outside the firewall. They are still spending billions of dollars securing, monitoring and investigating employees, on their own intranet. Yet, with a half billion people now on Facebook and anyone being able to be anyone on the internet, the problem has little corporate awareness or budget. They continue to spend 100's of millions of dollars on DLP (document or data loss prevention) solutions when 90% of the compromised data is carried out of the building and repurposed or distributed on the internet. When do you think Domino's, Dell, HP or Petland or a dozen other companies woke up to the internet problem? When millions of customers on YouTube or some other internet app saw a reputation destroying video and their good names or product were put in the mud?
To the second point, if you tell employees you now have a policy and are going to monitor all email and enforce it with a DLP solution, do you not think the committed employee who is leaving to go to a new company or planning on hurting the company in a serious way is not going to plan a different method to get sensitive data out of the company?
When are companies finally going to set the same DLP guidelines for Social Media and monitor and enforce them on the internet?
All in all, great group, great conference, learned allot and continue to gain respect for all the committed government and corporate employees and investigators in e-crimes units! Thoughts and comments always welcome as I fly home from Atlanta!