There’s been a lot of attention paid to “pretexting”,the practice of posing as someone else in order to gain access to their personal data, lately in the wake of the HP scandal. However, a British TV program has shown that there’s more than one way to skin the identity fraud cat, as an undercover reporter was offered the personal details of 100,000 UK bank customers, stolen by offshore call-center workers.

The knee-jerk reaction is simply to point the finger at outsourcing and offshoring, but they’re largely irrelevant to the situation. Lax corporate security and indifferent attitudes towards data breaches certainly aren’t restricted to a particular country, industry or line of work, so the suggestion that banks and other companies that allow offshored workers access to personal financial information could simply solve the problem by bringing outsourced functions back in-house is inaccurate.

Quite clearly, many companies’ security policies are inadequate, unenforced or nonexistent, whether for in-house employees or external suppliers, and there’s currently little motivation for them to take the problem seriously. Whether data is kept internally or shared with offshore workers doesn’t really seem to matter — it doesn’t appear particularly secure either way.

“Executives and politicians may be starting to realize that privacy is dead and secrets can no longer be kept in the information age. There is always a technological trail, and transparency is pervasive. Just ask Patricia Dunn and Mark Foley.

In a piece at eWeek, Ed Cone from CIO Insight talks about the specific technologies that brought them down.”

From the article:

“Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival. We talk a lot a about transparency as a virtue in the age of the web, and hold it up as a marketing technique and a better way to run an enterprise. Sun’s blogging CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is lobbying the SEC to allow more financial information to be disclosed online. Corporations are using all manner of web-techs to speak more directly to stakeholders. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a slogan or a strategy. It’s a reality. It can be imposed on you by the Internet, whether you want to be transparent or not.”