LeTip of East County

If you are traveling back and forth to work with client files in your car, you might want to start taking precautions, especially if those client files contain sensitive information.

Imagine this scenario…

You’re just leaving the office after a long day.

But like any good hard working employee or business owner, there’s always more work to be done and hard deadlines that need to be met.

So you pack up a few client files and load them into the back seat of your car so you can do a little work at home.

On the way home, you remember that you have to stop by the grocery store to get some milk and cereal so the kids can eat breakfast in the morning.

By the time you eventually get home, and get the groceries into the house, you’re just too tired to consider any more work for the evening and decide that you’ll wake up extra early in the morning to get a few things done before leaving for work.

Now, imagine if at some point in the above sequence your car is stolen or broken into and your briefcase is stolen. If this were to ever happen, you’re going to have to come to grips with some potentially painful consequences.

You are going to have to notify your clients that their documents were stolen and that there is a potential for identity theft. This could not only be crushing for your customers, but also for you professionally.

Here are some tips you can take in order to protect work documents that are routinely transferred to and from your secure office location:

1. You will want to have an accurate accounting of what documents were stolen. Only keep a minimal amount of client information when transporting documents back-and-forth between your office and home. If multiple employees are routinely taking home client information, you may want to implement a client information checkout procedure at the office. It’s much better to know which clients were affected than having to notify each and every one of your clients of a data breech.
2. Don’t assume your vehicle is safe. Keep in mind that you have customers’ information sitting in the car if you decide to make pit-stops on the way to or from the office. When you get home, be sure that you also bring in the documents where there’s a more reasonable expectation that they are safe.
3. Don’t leave documents lying around at home, in the office, or in the car if at all possible. This information should be protected just as you protect the information in your computer with passwords and behind firewalls. Keep physical document with sensitive information in secure filing cabinets or destroy those files on a routine basis if they are no longer needed.

Taking a few extra moments and steps to protect your customers data is not only the right thing to do professionally, but it is also an important policy to implement in order to protect the good name and reputation you’ve taken so long to build.

About the author: Mike Krauss is the CEO and President of Total Secure Shredding, Inc. a local Disabled Veteran owned San Diego Paper Shredding Service.

Tags: Briefcase, Business Owner, Identity Theft, Information Checkout, Office Location, Painful Consequences, Work Documents

Information you’ve long forgotten the existence and importance of is still being held in its entirety on those old computers you have sitting around in the garage.

Just a few weeks ago I resurrected an old PC that first was used in my home and then somewhere along the line migrated itself to the office.

During the time at the office, it had been kicked, shuffled, tipped over, and generally neglected.

But I had a need for another computer around the shop, and when faced with the cost of a new computer in relation for the need I had, I thought I might give the old computer a try.

So I hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse and fired it up.

To my surprise it started up perfectly fine and loaded up windows without a single problem.

But besides my amazement that the computer loaded up, I was even more surprised at all the old information that was still on the hard drive.

I completely forgot that this was the computer that I was using when I started Total Secure Shredding (A local document shredding company here in San Diego).

It had QuickBooks Files, old Quicken files (personal financial information), plenty of Word and Excel files, plus multiple email programs that were not password protected and which had a ton of old emails on them.

The moral is that these “Old” computers do have some very substantial information on them than may be putting your business or family at risk of Identity Theft.

And, as you may have seen in recent days, this also goes for just about every copier that has been built since 2002.

In April, CBS News broke the story that many copiers sent out for resale have not had their hard drives sanitized or replaced.

Of the four copiers that were picked at random to meet certain price and volume specifications, every last one of them had hard drives jammed full of confidential information. Adding insult to injury, two of them came from two different Buffalo NY police departments with one still having documents on the glass. One of the other was from a New York Construction company and contained design plans while the other was from a New York insurance company.

All that was needed to get documents of the copier from the insurance company was to hit “PRINT”. The result was “300 pages of individual medical records.” Current HIPAA regulations mandate that the information that was found (Drug Prescriptions, Blood Test Results, & Cancer Diagnosis) must be properly destroyed prior to disposal.

This dilemma can even be extended to some printers.

There are many “Enterprise” level printers that also contain hard drives that must be sanitized or destroyed before they leave your premises.

I personally research and tracked down at least 50 printer models that could contain hard drives. Not all of these appear to come standard with a hard drive but are optional. All that means is that you need to physically verify whether or not your printer has a hard drive.

So whether it’s your PC, your Laptop, your Printer, or your Copier, digital information is all around us and a permanent part of our society…

And precautions have to be make to ensure all that digital information is properly handled upon disposal – just as important as getting all your sensitive paper documents shredded.

As far as my old computer goes…

It turns out that some of the information on the hard drive got corrupted somehow and now the thing will no longer boot up. Whether or not I ever get the thing working again, one thing you can be sure on, hard drive shredding is an absolute must and I’ll make sure that hard drive is properly destroyed before it gets thrown out.

Keep Total Secure,

Mike Krauss
Total Secure Shredding, Inc.
(619) 295-5474

P.S. The reason the data on my old hard drive was corrupted was because of a USB Wireless Network “Thumb Drive” Device.  During the troubleshooting process to figure out what went wrong, I found out that the wireless device’s memory was able to hold the pass code to my networks wireless router.

When I plugged it into the replacement computer, it automatically accessed my network – not good.

So please, take a second look at anything electronic. Who knows what information it might contain?

Tags: Amazement, Buffalo Ny, Cbs, Cbs News, Confidential Information, Copiers, Email Programs, Existence, Financial Information, Hard Drive, Hard Drives, Identity Theft, Insult To Injury, Keyboard, New Computer, Old Computer, Old Computers, Police Departments, San Diego, Shredding Company