posted on Friday, April 13, 2007 11:52 AM
by
Lou Michels
Invasion of the Pod People
PC World contained an interesting article recently entitled "Can an iPod Bring Down Your Company?" It seems the answer is an unequivocal "yes", because notwithstanding their sleek appearance and unparalleled functionality for listening to music, video, etc., iPods and MP3 players are very good storage devices that can remove all kinds of information from a computer system just like a thumb or a flash drive.
The problem, of course, is that iPods are seen as relatively innocuous -- they're for entertainment, right? Employers who might be nervous watching people tote 80 gigabytes of flash drives into their offices apparently have little to no concern about a similarly capable iPod. The nature of the iPod storage system, according to the article, means that people can remove huge amounts of data (40 gigs, or even 80 gigs in some of the video models) and frequently go undetected. The article notes that such theft of corporate data using an iPod is known as "slurping."
Yikes!! That'll be bad news for 7-11 and the Slurpee business for sure. At least, I wouldn't be talking about my icy, refreshing beverage around the office in the presence of the IT department.
The article doesn't provide much guidance on how to prevent corporate theft using these devices other than banning them from the workplace entirely. That may not be an option in most companies. But it might not be a bad idea to tell employees they can't place iTunes or comparable software on their own computers for downloading purposes, especially since there is now a report of an iPod virus that migrates from iTunes to an individual unit, and back out again.
Just another little thing to worry about on Friday the 13th.