Loose Lips Sink Companies

A cautionary tale

Thu, 07/19/2018 - 12:03

If asked whether you guard your company’s secrets, most of us would say, “Well, of course I do.” But I’m guessing that if you are a remote worker, or do any work while on the road, you are blithely handing out company secrets and don’t even know it. If nothing bad has happened yet, it’s only because the right (or wrong) person hasn’t been near you as you shared critical company information.

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According to Gallup, 43 percent of employees work away from their team at least some of the time. Meaning, at home or elsewhere. And by elsewhere I mean Starbucks, your favorite café, the auto repair shop, the airport, or a doctor’s office. Most remote workers take their laptop with them if they know they are going to be waiting for something. Why waste time, right? And that waiting area is very often a public place.

Or maybe you aren’t technically a remote worker, but you are often on the road and keep in constant contact with your office over the phone or email. You may even log onto a corporate portal, VPN, or even a cloud app to get some work done. It is so easy to work remotely that eventually anywhere seems like your office. Except it isn’t. It’s public. And, not to be paranoid, but you don’t know who’s listening.

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Comments

Submitted by Jeff Dewar on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 09:37

Great article Dirk. I must confess, as another older fellow, that I continue to be astonished at how "open" the younger generations are about their personal info, relationships, health issues, etc. There was a time... when personal matters were private matters. A number of times I've asked bank employees, government employees, health care employees (usually at a window or reception desk) if we could speak more privately or quietly--in every case their response was cooperative, showing that they recognized some information should not be shared so loudly or openly. It's just that our behaviors don't reflect that value, until we request it. .

I was on one of Denver International Airport's passenger trains when I overheard a woman half way down the car trying to order something over her phone. She kept repeating her credit card number loudlly. The passengers around me were looking at her quizzically. I said, "Hey, let me write that down." Everyone laughed. She mindlessly ignored the laughter.

Remember: You are not alone in the universe. You are not in a phone booth. You are in public and everyone is listening unless they are on their phone too.

This is something of which I was not aware: "This is a real problem in huge public spaces like airports, which often have bogus WiFis waiting for you to log into." It would not surprise me if the scammers create a WiFi address that looks like the legitimate one to get people to connect to it. Airports meanwhile need to be better at posting the authorized address; I have often had trouble finding it.

Yeah. If you follow that Forbes link in the article you see a pretty good write-up on it. Very often the SSID will be something like "Free WiFi" or something enticing. Usually, I have found, if you try to connect to those WiFi sources, they won't work. But sometimes you get through to a logon web page that looks a bit suspiscious, or sometimes is so full of ads that you can't even use it... which I suspect might be the reason for the site. Not so much to steal info but to gather a jillion ad views. In any case, your mobile hotspot usually works better than any WiFi I have ever found in an airport. The airport WiFi usually seems to be so overloaded that using it is painful. Would rather eat up some of my phone data.

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