If your primary defense against portable storage devices is to seal up the USB ports on your users' computers, you'd better be pretty darn good with a glue gun.
That's the message that's emerged from court documents surrounding the recently revealed security breach at Countrywide Home Loans, where an employee siphoned off about 20,000 customer records a week for more than two years and sold them to a third party. {See {doclink 160767}.)
An affidavit by an FBI special agent assigned to the case reveals exactly how the insider attack took place. It states that in an effort to prevent users from loading unauthorized data onto memory sticks or other portable storage media, Countrywide had sealed the USB ports on all of its employees' machines -- all, that is, except one.
Rene Rebollo Jr., 36, a former senior financial analyst with Countrywide Home Loans subprime mortgage division, found that one machine near his own workspace, according to the affidavit. And so, every Sunday night for about two years, Rebollo brought a memory stick over to that machine and downloaded personal information on approximately 20,000 customers.
Countrywide had not deployed any method for detecting or managing downloads to portable storage devices, since its policy was to block their use entirely on all employee machines. As a result, the downloads went undetected for years, leading to the compromise of some 2 million records, according to court documents.
With the move to the cloud, CISOs must shift priorities from operating security programs to overseeing (monitoring and auditing) outsourced cybersecurity programs.
2022 was a boon year for IT salaries. 2023 came in like a beast with layoffs, raise freezes, and ChatGPT, but that beast has few teeth.
Age is only a number. Don't let a high number cancel your career.
