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about Asia Buzz
Asia Buzz: For Your Eyes Only
Cybercafes are a gold mine of information, including yours
By ERIC ELLIS
September
26, 2000
Web posted at 12:10 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12:10 a.m. EDT
The travails of Martin Indyk don't really mean much in Asia. But they should.
Indyk is the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, now under a security cloud because he
allegedly mishandled classified State Department information. His misdemeanor,
it seems, was to type up notes and letters on critical matters of state into
nonclassified laptop computers, such as one that he had at home.
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INTERACTIVE |
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Leaving sensitive information where you shouldn't is an easy mistake to make in
this cyberage, particularly in Asia where access and understanding remains
limited. Got a dinner party but waiting on an important e-mail? Easy, have a
quiet word with the host and then duck in to use their family Mac in between
courses. I've edited stories like this. It's easy, fast, and convenient. Isn't
that one of the attractions of the Net, the ability to be effective anywhere?
But I shouldn't have done it. My company's information doesn't belong to me. And
it certainly isn't for viewing by my dinner hosts.
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ASIAWEEK |
Intelligence
The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek
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The average cybercafe is a potential store of such information. These are not
always places occupied by slacking geeks with nothing else to do, or grungy
backpackers tapping out e-mails to mother back home. Executives on the run often
use them to check messages. What they often don't realize is that e-mails and
attachments downloaded and read via generic accounts like AOL or Compuserve have
a habit of staying in the program's inbox. Just because you've tapped your
account and password into the relevant fields doesn't mean that you are the only
one who gets to read them. The account is yours, but not the program, which is
simply the forum via which access is made.
And deleting doesn't help. Deleted messages are never really deleted unless they
are removed from the hard drive...and who knows how to do that? At a cybercafe
in Hong Kong recently, I was fascinated to read about the seven-figure monthly
salary being negotiated by an investment banker. He'd popped down to get a
coffee and, obviously anxious at the prospect of a new job, checked his e-mail
while he was waiting. And left his new life on display for all to see. Remember
the former CIA director John Deutsch, who got into trouble when he used his AOL
account to access top-level security documents while he was in the U.S. Defense
Department?
Embracing the IT age doesn't just mean registering a website and then hiring
some geek to build it. It means treating your entire network with kid gloves. A
computer that is corporate or government property but used at home or while
travelling should be free of unauthorized programs. And users.
Eric Ellis is the Southeast Asia and Technology Editor of the regional finance
portal AsiaWise.com
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