Protecting Your Business' Online Presence

While speaking to various organizations, I am constantly amazed at the lack of concern for protecting a business’ online presence. I offer a two hour session that focuses on finding personal information online, which begins to open the eyes of Management, but that was not cutting it. I have developed a new course that will concentrate on protecting a business from an internet view.

This interactive session identifies and demonstrates several methods of searching for information about a company online. This should be conducted monthly by any business that has an online presence. These queries will discover publicly available information that could harm an organization. A sample of topics includes locating complaints about service, employee information, comments from individuals, photos that can be tracked to the company, employee activity online, employee profiles, private emails, inaccurate information, common network vulnerabilities, confidential documents, user names and passwords, and even private customer data. Previous demonstrations have displayed that entire drives full of sensitive company documents were visible online by anyone with an internet connection. Solutions to solve all of these issues will be presented, as well as direct links to the sites that will help one identify the problems.

In a previous post (LINK HERE), I discussed how Peer to Peer software on ANY machine in a business could leak sensitive data to anyone on the internet. These programs, such as Kazaa, Limewire, and BearShare, are very common and usually used to download music. These programs also share data by default, and expose your sensitive information.

As another example, I explain how Meta Data within your documents on your web server may be exposing a lot of information about your employees, your computer systems, and the software that you are using (which exposes serious vulnerabilities). The last location where I presented this information exposed several forgotten documents that were still online which identified several user names, email addresses, illegal pirated applications, server names and directories, copy machine information, and even evidence of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. This demonstration was conducted from scratch using free software, and completed in less than four minutes.

In total, I display over fifty resources that will help keep your online presence in a form that will benefit the business. I highly recommend that this session is presented to both Management and the individual(s) that will be conducting the inquiries. In order to view the complete presentation, a minimum of two hours is needed.

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