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McAfee Leaks Conference Attendees' Personal Info
Timmy writes "In the cruelest of ironies, e-mail security vendor McAfee has accidentally coughed up the personal details of some 1400 attendees of its recent security conference in Sydney, Australia. Those who were sent the list — attached as a spreadsheet to a thank you e-mail — are far from pleased that such an extraordinary thing could happen. McAfee, which sells products to 'stop sensitive and protected data from leaving the enterprise through email and web traffic' has blamed 'human error' for the blunder and is 'taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.' Doh!"
Title should say "attendees'", not "attendee's".
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Things like this even happen to the best of us.
The ironing is delicious. -Bart Simpson
Further proof that no matter how good of a system we design, the universe will design a better idiot to use it.
You forgot to attach the spreadsheet to that post ;)
Wikileaks did the exact same thing. Later someone send the leak to them, and they had to give out those donators info per their rules :)
People working at these positions should really check their emails before they mass send them..
Play them off, keyboard cat!
Irony indeed. This will certainly lose them a lot of customers. You have to wonder how good a security company can be if they could pull a boner like this one. It's going to take quite a while for them to recover from this.
However, I'm sure they will. Sony's rootkit never put them out of business, Jack in the Box is still selling hamburgers despite poisoning many of their customers (as well as a lot of other food sellers selling poisoned food), etc.
Free Martian Whores!
They should have used symantec firewall.
Dear Ms Morissette,
This is irony. Please take note.
Yours truly
McAfee's marketing department leaked it, because they were testing the old 'bad publicity is worse than no publicity' theory.
Results so far are not promising.
"Human Error"
Don't attend a McAfee Conference!
Further proof that security is a human problem. Technology can help in some areas, and hinder in others, but at the end of the day it's the monkey at the keyboard banging out the works of Shakespeare that is the weak link in the chain.
Computers would be secure against viruses if people didn't open attachments or surf to dodgy sites. Phishing emails wouldn't work if people didn't reply to them, same goes for 419 scams.
Security is a human issue, it's not a technological issue and a purely technical solution will never work 100%.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Somewhat related, I work on an institutional review board that reviews human studies submissions for a large university. One main dichotomy that is used to classify protocols is the concept of "minimal risk" vs. "greater than minimal risk," minimal risk defined somewhat loosely as risks encountered in everyday life.
Accidental sharing of protected health information is considered a risk of many of these studies that collect sensitive information. We continue to subsequently review incidents in which protected health information has been "spilled," leaving us to determine if this was an "expected" or "unexpected" event.
Unfortunately, a la Ian Malcolm, I've come to believe that it is essentially guaranteed (thus expected) that these leaks will occur, making loss of confidentiality now just part of everyday life, therefore "minimal risk" from the point of view of the US federal regulations on human studies.
This is why there's no such thing as a technical solution to a social problem.
Here's another example: My company instituted a policy where recipient names would not auto complete on the To/CC fields - enforced through the domain security policy - to prevent people from sending stuff meant for one client to another.
Less than 48 hours later someone sent a sensitive email to the wrong client anyway.
Question everything
"taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again" = someone is getting fired
They were using their own products and they failed. Or if they weren't using their own products - why not?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I actually READ TFA.
Turns out the summary was pretty accurate.
Just thought I'd mention that.
Many conferences routinely give/sell information about conference participants to sponsors & exhibitors.
I was recently at a trade show, and the ID badges had a bar code on the back so that booth exhibitors could easily get your contact info instead of using business cards.
Well, a week later, I started to get follow up emails from exhibitors I was interested in that had scanned my badge. This was expected.
BUT, I also received lots of email from vendors I wasn't interested in, didn't visit their booths, and they didn't scan my badge.
Fortunately, I created a new email alias when I signed up for the conference, so it's easy to identify these spammers.
Yes, they are spammers. I didn't sign up to be contacted, I never talked to you, and we have no business relationship. Maybe I should find a bottom-feeding lawyer on contingency... can I sue under the CAN-SPAM act?
3....2.....1.....
Ok who wants to buy my McAffee stock options for 1/10th of their worth, anybody,....anybody....???
Does anyone remember the time McAfee distributed a signature file that caused its software to delete executable binaries from computers? This caused me and many other persons much grief. A few months afterward, a vendor asked me what McAfee could do to make up for such a thing. My response was that that they couldn't, that they should just go out of business.
No, it's what your mommie uses to make your shirties flat.
Free Martian Whores!
to send that particular information to... Or about, for that matter. The thought makes me smile. Not only did they send a bunch of personal information out via e-mail, but they sent it to a bunch of hackers. Not only did they send a bunch of personal information to a bunch of hackers via email, but it was the personal information of those very hackers.
Once again PEBKAC and the Human Element proves to be the bane of the person trying to make computer data secure. I face this every day and to this day I still wonder how the hell my parents don't get more infections then they currently do. Wait that would be me making sure their antispyware and antivirus is up to date every time their backs are turned.
It does help that I drummed in safe surfing practices into their heads.
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye
I just went to my McAfee account and used the forgot password link. Either my password was stored unencrypted or it is one of those rare words that hashes to itself.
... calling McAfee a security company.
What they seem to sell is a placebo to make Windows users feel they are secure. Yeah, their software may find infected files on your system but that's after they're already there. Who knows whether someone's accessed them and installed god-only-knows what sort of [spy|bot]ware on the system. What they sell are snakeoil^Wcures not preventions.
Didn't this happen last year as well??
When will McAfee just shrivel up and die? Their software sucks and it seems like this is at least the second or third seriously high profile mistake on their part. Does anyone really buy McAfee security products, or do they simply scrape by with the revenue from renewals on OEM pre-installs? I don't know a single IT person who looks at McAfee software when considering corporate security products.
I'd call it a Darwinian development. Anyone putting their security in McAfee pretty much deserves what they get.
Wohoo! Not only my first first-post but my first Offtopic post as well! (or at least, the first one to get modded as such)