7 Data Theft Hotspots for Meeting Professionals
Everybody wants your data, especially when you are in the business of meetings. Your data doesn’t just have a high face value (e.g., the attendee data, including credit card numbers that you collect and store in your online registration system), it also has a high resale value .
Here is how the theft is most often committed in your industry:
- Competitors hire one of your employees and they leave with a thumb drive full of confidential files, including client lists, personally identifying information on talent and employees, financial performance data, etc.
- Social engineers (con artists) mine your employee’s Facebook profiles to gain a heightened level of trust which allows them to manipulate your human assets
- Cyber criminals hack your lax computer network or sniff the unprotected wireless connections you and your employees use while traveling (Starbucks, hotels, airports).
- Mobile Computing Thieves target your digital devices (Laptop, smartphone, tablet) and other weak points while on the road.
- Opportunistic Vendors (Cleaning services, painters, landlords) quietly collect data assets from your desks, filing cabinets, trash cans and dumpsters when you aren’t even in the office.
Research is screaming at us—more than 80% of businesses surveyed have already experienced at least one breach (average recovery cost according to the Ponemon Institute: $7.2 million) and have no idea of how to stop a repeat performance.
13 Data Security Tips for Meeting Professionals – SGMP
I just finished delivering a keynote speech for the Society of Government Meeting Professionals (SGMP) at their annual convention on identity theft and protecting data in the meetings industry. Data security is a top concern in this industry because it is probably one of the most highly-targeted groups for identity theft, social media fraud, data breach and social engineering. Here’s why:
- Meeting professionals collect, store and transmit massive amounts of private data on attendees
- Data theft risk skyrockets when travel is involved, which is a frequent occurrence for meeting planners and professionals
- Meeting professionals are busy nearly 24 hours a day once they are onsite for the conference or meeting, meaning that they are highly distracted
- A single data breach of attendee data can put the organization responsible for the event out of business due to excessive costs and tight compliance regulations
- Conferences are generally collections of highly professional, highly valuable attendees who travel with laptops, sensitive intellectual property, smartphones, unsecured WiFi connections, etc.
Meeting professionals have enormous responsibilities throughout every stage of the planning process. Identity thieves target conferences because of the sheer quantity and value of data circulating around these events. Protecting sensitive attendee data before, during and after the event has become not only a nicety, but a necessity. Data stolen during the planning, execution or clean-up phases of your event can hamstring your organization with financial liabilities and a public relations nightmare. Start by taking these steps:
Meeting Planners: On Site Protection
By Mickey Murphy
Information security. Identity theft. Black hat hackers. This all sounds like three-alarm lingo from some old DC comic book: “Immediately sign over all of your wealth, or I will hack you and steal your identity!” What do these oblique, non-intuitive terms mean? Here is how Wikipedia defines them: Information security — “Protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction.” Identity theft — Fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.” Black hat hackers (also known as crackers) — “Hackers who specialize in unauthorized penetration” of computer systems, as opposed to white hat hackers who test computer systems for companies to determine their penetrability.
However we characterize them, information security, identity theft and so on represent major challenges today.
A prime example of consumer vulnerability came last year when federal authorities indicted three men on charges of hacking into computer systems at numerous Dave & Buster’s restaurants and stealing
credit 
card information. The federal government accused the men of stealing “Track 2” magnetic stripe data — which includes account numbers, expiration data and security codes — from customers’ credit cards, and then selling this information to others who used it to make fraudulent purchases.
Meeting Planning Guide – 5 Ways to Create an Extraordinary Experience
Having a great meeting planning guide can be a great time saver when attempting to plan any sort of meeting/conference.
Meeting planners have more on their plates at one time than just about any profession I’ve experienced. Who else spends months anticipating every minute detail leading up to an event only to find out that their work has just begun? And to discover that many of the rules have changed mid-course?
Putting together a successful meeting can be a stressful endeavor, which is why I have put together a “best practices” meeting planning guide, with 5 important tips for planning an “out of this world” meeting. These tips are strategic in nature – how to move from organizing speakers to hiring speakers that rock.
This guide will help you find new and creative ways to engage your audience, and provide you tips for creating a conference/meeting participants will never forget.
Best of all, I’m giving it away absolutely FREE! (Those of you have already been in my audience know that there is no such thing as FREE! There is always a catch, always a price when someone is advertising free goods. Sorry to make a teaching point here, but it’s my job. In this case, you are giving away your name and email address in exchange for the white paper. Hopefully your attendees think about this type of information leakage when they sign up for FREE offers.) If you find the meeting planning guide useful, please leave a comment about it here at my blog!
Sileo In the Media
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