McAfee Leaks Conference Attendees' Personal Info 72
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!"
Oops! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obligary, but funny (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why I don't want my personal information in any database anywhere.
Re:Title error (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually its Attendees' since they are plural and their information was lost
That's really very funny, you're the third person to correct the poster by replying with exactly what s/he had already posted. Too, you've fallen victim to Muphry's law [wikipedia.org] in your own post...
Title should say "attendees'", not "attendee's".
Let me re-paste the same quote, and add the space which reveals that which you all have failed to see...
Title should say "attendees' ", not "attendee's".
Security is a human issue (Score:5, Insightful)
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%.
Re:Security is a human issue (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like the old Dancing Bunnies [msdn.com] problem.
The user wants to see the dancing bunnies, so they click there. It doesn't matter how much you try to disuade them, if they want to see the dancing bunnies, then by gum, they're going to see the dancing bunnies. It doesn't matter how many technical hurdles you put in their way, if they stop the user from seeing the dancing bunny, then they're going to go and see the dancing bunny.