I’m sure that my company is very much like many others when it comes to security. They take it with a grain of salt. (what the heck does that phrase mean anyway?). At any rate, security is just something that sucks up money for no good reason until something happens. So as part of my job, I have assumed the duties of pointing out the flaws in their logic. I am not always successful, but on this particular day I had an rather brilliant idea if I say so myself.

You see on this day I was doing one of my many other assigned duties, transferring cash amongst our several bank accounts. For reasons beyond me (I hate accounting and that’s a whole other issue), we have several bank accounts that we use for various reasons. Probably to try and keep track of different things that our DOS based accounting system can’t. That’s right; let me say that again for all you who are keeping score. D-O-S based accounting system. For those of you born after 1980, that’s Disk Operating System, anyway I digress.

As part of my procedure, I have to print out a sheet with all the account numbers and balances on it. Once I’m finished, I shred the sheet in my shredder. Now I have one of those old cast iron monsters that merely shred the paper in strips. Of course these were great and we loved them. Especially to those of us in the military who had to destroy documents with a burn barrel. Now there was some fun. Burn, turn, and stir. Repeat as necessary. How’s that for a document destruction policy?

I decided I would give myself 5 minutes and dig through my shredded pile of paper in my office to see how much info I could find. I figure 5 minutes was the maximum amount of time someone who gained entrance to the office during the day would have. Keep in mind that the recycler and the trash guy have an unlimited amount of time. So I set a stop watch and away I went.

During the 5 minutes I pulled out anything that looked like it had something readable on it and set it aside. Now figuring the data thief would take his stuff off site, I started sifting through the stuff and using scotch tape, I taped it to a plain piece of paper. I even surprised myself with what I found.

I was able to identify 13 of our 14 accounts with their account numbers. I knew the exact balances of three of them. I identified two of our loan accounts and the balance on one of those accounts. I also was able to determine which bank held the accounts. Hmmmm….. bank number accounting number, probably wouldn’t take too long to determine a routing number for the bank and presto-chango I have an electronic address for those accounts.

Now granted that the bank has some safeguards in place to prevent this from happening. We also have stipulated that there are only a few specific accounts that allow electronic transfers. To be sure, I tested those and so I feel relatively secure about that. But at any rate I didn’t think this was information that we could just hand out either. Why make the bad guy’s job easier.

So I made up a nice memo of what I did, attached my taped up piece of paper and within a week we had all brand new shredders in our office. Of course now I have to write up a document destruction policy but hey, that was my ultimate goal anyway. Point made, score one for me. Sage of the present, Oracle of the future. (the I.A.N. slogan which I think I’m going to make my official tag line).