The Best Way To Protect Some Data Is To Kill It

Traditionally, IT leaders have seen a key part of their roles as protecting corporate data, whether that’s from thieves or the accidental erasure of crucial files. But a role that is focused on much less is the strategic need to protect a company’s intellectual assets by destroying data. Making data go away—and stay away—is becoming especially difficult today.

Let’s take the first part. How difficult is it today to erase a file? I mean really erase it. Among the twists is Windows Shadow Copy, which quietly makes backup files, which are extremely difficult to delete. Add on top of that mobile devices, thumb drives and working from home and it’s startling how quickly a simple delete becomes impossible. This is true whether the deletion is for an honorable reason—such as removing sensitive personnel-related data when a laptop is transferred from one employee (or a departing employee) to a new employee—to less honorable issues such as deleting information before it can be subpoenaed or sought in legal discovery.

One sensitive document created on a company desktop machine may, in a matter of minutes, be unintentionally copied in 10 locations: an employee’s desktop; the LAN server that backs it up; a PDA; the carrier/vendor server that synchs the PDA data; a memory stick; the home computer the employee used that memory stick in; the personal external backup drive connected to that employee’s computer; an offsite backup service the employee uses; the shadow copy on that employee’s work desktop machine; and the shadow copy on that employee’s home desktop machine.

And if that employee happened to E-mail that file to colleagues, clients or anyone else, the number of copies of that file may mushroom by the number of people who were cc’ed and all of the places on their devices were it might be stored, plus various E-mail servers and the servers on the ISPs for the entity sending it and the entities receiving it. And their backup systems. Speaking of backup. Yesterday’s full system backup complicates this even further.

As a philosopher might say, the only safe way to delete a file is to have never recorded it. As silly as that may sound from a data security perspective, it shouldn’t be dismissed.

Consider this scenario: A chain notices a PDA app that uses geolocation to match consumers with local happy hours. (For those outside the U.S., it’s a time when bars tend to heavily discount alcoholic beverages.) It throws the app onto its mobile site as a service for a customers and thinks nothing of it.

As a matter of policy, the chain decides that it will not use any of that information for marketing or anything else. Fair enough. But what if local law enforcement chooses to subpoena those records so that it can know who frequents happy hours a lot. And if it can tap into realtime data, police could try and catch them in the act. And maybe some civil attorneys try to subpoena the documents as well for some automobile accident cases.

In this scenario, let’s say the retailer aggressively fought all of these efforts, but ultimately lost. The consumers are furious at that retailer, as that’s the trusted brand that they see as having betrayed them. It doesn’t matter that the balance prohibited it, nor that no employees helped and it’s also irrelevant that the chain spent barrels of cash to oppose it. The data was collected by the chain, preserved by the chain and then taken from the chain.

Bottom line: Once data is saved to a file, you may never be able to get rid and you certainly could lose control of it. (Truth be told, you never really had control of it, but I’d rather not be that harsh.)

This is as applicable to geolocation data as it is to driver’s licenses shown to support an age-restricted purchase or to allow a receipt-less return. It’s especially relevant for payment card data. If the retailer never saves it, it can’t be stolen from them.

Evan Schuman is a guest blogger on the McAfee Security Insights blog. Evan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of StorefrontBacktalk.com, a global site that tracks retail IT and E-Commerce issues for readers. He also writes the weekly Retail Realities column for CBSNews.com. More on Evan can be read on his author page.

Tags: Data Protection, PCI, Risk and Compliance