Not So Comcastic

Security blogger Matt Johansen (follow him on Twitter as @mattjay) has a good summary of a recent Comcast data breach you may or may not have heard about recently. Check it out here:

Comcast Cares (insufficiently)

Go read it!  Short story is that, "a list of Comcast a list of Comcast customers’ usernames and passwords, 8,000 entries long, was exposed on a public website for at least two months."

Now, I'm not sure how this particular list got there, but I'll tell you something I do know:

Employees in the typical enterprise need to share confidential and sensitive data with other employees all the time. And when they don't have a secure way to share or exchange sensitive files with an employee or business partner in another location, they will resort to sharing in an insecure manner.  Like, oh, posting sensitive files to a document sharing site like Scribd (where the Comcast list was found) and then forgetting to delete them.

Products like Proofpoint's own Secure File Transfer appliance can help with this problem. When I read the Comcast story, I was reminded of this whitepaper I put together a while ago:

No More FTP: Eliminate FTP and Email Attachment Issues with Secure File Transfer