I had a post yesterday that focuesed on the security events at Midyear. However, given the attention that the recent breach of personal information at the Department of Veterans Affairs has been receiving, it might be a good time for you to consider your organiztion’s policies and procedures surrounding protection of personal identity information. It appears that the incident could have been prevented if policies, already in place, were followed.
NAR has two programs that directly focus on protecting consumer and employee information.
The recently announced "Deter, Detect and Defend” initative aims to educate consumers, particularly home buyers, about the devastating effects of identity theft and help them protect themselves against it.
NAR’s REALTOR Secure program is an information security best pratices program that allows industry firms to confirm that they have the right policies, procedures and technologies in place to prevent these types of incidents.
And we at CRT are available to help on the security education front. Over a hundred industry firms have benefited from CRT’s outreach program with information security being one of the prime topics.
So to ‘take advantage’of this event you could:
- Review your policies and ensure that you have the appropriate use procedures in place.
- Send a reminder about your policies and the need for following them.
- Use it to educate senior management about the need for protecting information.
- Ask executive management that they reinforce the need to follow security policies to avoid these situations.
