Eternal vigilance

Despite continual warnings from security experts about the importance of vigilance in IT, security breaches are occurring at an alarming rate.

This week, Police in New South Wales were the latest to breach privacy, disclosing email and password details of senior counter terrorism officers and hundreds of journalists signed up to receive information from the NSW Police Media Unit.

This is just one of a series of breaches following hot-on-the-heels of leaks at other law enforcement agencies including Australian police forces, Hong Kong Police and the CIA in recent weeks.

According to Samia Rauf, director, Asia Pacific for document security vendor Workshare, every day new incidences of privacy breaches, company data being leaked and other compliance violations occurring.

These can be prevented by taking some of the following measures such as converting content from risky to safe by cleansing and removing ‘metadata – or hidden information’ such as track changes or speaker notes, hidden columns, etc contained in MS Office files, she said.