In June a member of the public came to the gate of one of our depots holding a bundle of our paperwork. He had taken it from a waste bin at the rear of the site, where it had been sitting in the open for at least a day. A hundred and eighty delivery notes, each with a name, an address and a telephone number, and in eleven cases a gate code a driver had written on the sheet in biro.
Nothing was attacked. That was the uncomfortable part. Our security programme for the year had been a good one. Multi factor authentication finished, detection on the endpoints, a classification scheme, controls on what can leave by email or by a memory stick. Every one of those controls faces the digital exits. Not one of them has anything to say about a printer, which is an exit we install in every building we own and then stop thinking about.
So we counted. We print a little over one point one million pages a year, and roughly forty percent of that happens at sites rather than in offices. Picking lists, manifests, delivery notes, a second copy kept in the cab because drivers have learned that a dispute six weeks later goes badly without one, and at one depot an entire supplier ordering process that still arrives and leaves on paper. Confidential waste bins existed at head office and at three of our thirty nine sites. Everywhere else, paper went in with the shrink wrap.
We reported it, which was the right thing and not a pleasant fortnight. The remedies were cheap and dull. Confidential waste at every site, which costs less per month than one of our software subscriptions. Two of the printed documents no longer carry the customer's telephone number or the full address, because neither was ever needed by the person holding the sheet. Electronic proof of delivery removes the cab copy for about half our routes this year. An annual print audit, and a standing rule that a new report which prints customer data gets the same review as a data export.
We had spent a year making our data expensive to steal and left the cheapest copy of it in a bin behind a building anyone can walk up to.
– Serguey Shinder
Top comments (0)