Oz PM's department red-faced after database leaks in the cc: field The Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in an excess of security ineptitude, has mistaken the cc: field for the bcc: field. The inevitable result: a database of names and addresses has leaked. The department, on behalf of the Australian government, was e-mailing women on a register called AppointWomen to tell …
This seems like the obvious solution. Good software protects the user from their own stupidity. I've certainly benefited from well-designed software this way. I don't believe anyone has never been thankful for some application having a sensible sanity-check on certain operations.
Make it impossible to send out an email with >10 addresses in the "To" or "CC" fields. Or at least make sure it generates a big warning message; "You are about to reveal the email address of every recipient to every other recipient!"
Email is really not a networking tool, where you need threaded conversations among large numbers of people. Or at least, it hasn't been for the last ten years. We've moved past that. So no-one should be in the habit of sending emails in this fashion.
Sending an email is not an IT task. It's not a "Politics-type" task either. It's an Administrative task. Performed by fallible people, like anything else. Inevitably that means people will screw up sometimes.
What is needed is training/policy that makes it hard for this kind of mistake to occur..
"What is needed is training/policy that makes it hard for this kind of mistake to occur.."
What is needed is Manglement to understand that they don't understand why this kind of mistake can occur, and allow the IT staff to do their job, and train the proles in the proper use of corporate systems ...
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