Is your data secure?

Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees?
In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job.
This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have walked out of a company with customer mailing lists, and I’m sure there are other incidents.
ESPs should take action to prevent employees from stealing customer data.

The return of the Magill Report
Spamhaus and Gmail

Related Posts

How do unengaged recipients hurt delivery?

In the comments Ulrik asks: “How can unengaged recipients hurt delivery if they aren’t complaining? What feedback mechanism is there to hurt the the delivery rate besides that?”
There are a number of things that ISPs are monitoring besides complaint rates, although they are being cautious about revealing what and how they are measuring things. I expect that ISPs are measuring things like:

Read More

Don't always believe the statistics

Mark Brownlow has a great roundup of how statistics and data can mislead marketers if they’re not really paying attention.

Read More

Protecting customer data

There have been a number of reports recently about customer lists leaking out through ESPs. In one case, the ESP attributed the leak to an outside hack. In other cases, the ESPs and companies involved have kept the information very quiet and not told anyone that data was leaked. People do notice, though, when they use single use addresses or tagged addresses and know to whom each address was submitted. Data security is not something that can be glossed over and ignored.
Most of the cases I am aware of have actually been inside jobs. Data has been stolen either by employees or by subcontractors that had access to it and then sold to spammers. There are steps that companies can take to prevent leaks and identify the source when or if they do happen.

Read More