LEAKED: Two observations from the Sony Pictures hack

I am sure you have heard or read about the widespread hack and subsequent leaks of massive amounts of corporate information like email archives and other sensitive organizational (and HR) data at Sony Pictures.

If you would like to be familiar, or at least caught up, a useful timeline of the hack and the leaks, (which appear to be ongoing), is here.

Embarrassing email exchanges, written potshots being taken at various industry players, and even a dump (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet), of salary and other HR data for the organization's executives.

A mess. And seemingly not going anywhere, not for a while anyway.

So here are my two, thought about this for 10 minutes, observations for HR/Talent professionals from this brouhaha.

1. It's time to stop thinking of Email as private, secured communication. I think since the rapid rise, and subsequent realization of the lack of privacy of public social networks like Twitter and Facebook, we somehow look at email, in comparison, and think it is private and secure. And while it should be, the Sony hack is just another example that reminds us that any communication in written, digital form is not ever 100% secure. We use Email so much, and in the large company environment it is so essential and ubiquitous, we have become beguiled to accept it as (mostly) private by default. And that is, in a word, insane. Forget about getting hacked by a malicious 3rd party - all it takes for your private, sensitive, possibly career-threatening email to get out into the world is one tiny error in the CC box, or one slip-up when forwarding something to John Jones and having it go to John Johnson instead. Lesson: Stop emailing so much (general). And talk to your leaders, managers, and employees about maybe picking up the phone once in a while.

2. Employee and HR data in Excel spreadsheets is likely your single largest HR data-related risk area. Every single company has HR or Comp people with salary, bonuses, and other HR/Compensation data sitting in Excel spreadsheets on individual PCs and company servers. For smaller companies, this is usually out of necessity: Excel is the only tool available to them to do comp calculations and analyses. But even in larger companies that have powerful and sophisticated Compensation Planning tools, often these tools are used to simply dump Employee and Comp data into Excel for additional manipulation and even file sharing. The Comp planning systems are powerful and secure. Excel spreadsheets are powerful and highly insecure (ask Sony). Where should you insist your Comp data remain?

We have spent literally years reminding our kids and each other that nothing that gets posted on Facebook or Instagram is really private.

It is also time to remind ourselves and our employees that nothing posted anywhere is really private either.

Have a great week!

Weekly Wrap Up - May 17-23, 2010

Still in keeping with the recurring theme of trying to break out of the echo chamber and making online content (like this blog) more easily accessible and consumable for those people that will never find their way here to read the blog (see the following crude pie chart below analyzing these populations).

I thought I would start posting each Sunday the summary of the week's posts in Tabbloid format. As you might recall from an earlier post, Tabbloid is a free service that lets you create a custom PDF format 'newspaper' from your selected blogs and other sites RSS feeds, and have that newspaper delivered via email on whatever schedule you choose.

Here is this week's collection of posts, in handy PDF format - Steve's Blog : May 17-23, 2010.

I hope making content accessible in this way is a help to someone out there, I will continue to post these collections on Sundays for the time being.  I hope that if you find them useful, or actually download the PDF and give/send it to someone that otherwise would have never seen these posts, you would take a second and let me know in the comments. 

This is one way to try to break out of the echo chamber, but it is certainly not the only way, and if you have other and better thoughts on how to do this, I would love to hear them.

And so I don't get accused of simply 're-purposing' my own content to keep the feed readers fed, here is a new bit of information - the excellent and very cool site Significant Objects in conjunction with their sister site HiLobrow recently announced a neat writing contest. The premise - Write a story set in the town or city where you live, but imagine that it (and its surrounding area) has been flooded with several hundred thousand gallons of crude oil daily, because of a drilling-related crisis some weeks earlier. You might find using the interactive Gulf Coast Oil Spill Map helpful in this eco-catastrophic exercise, but it’s not a requirement. 

The 'story' has a short 250 word maximum, and you can post your entry in the comments of this post on HiLobrow. I mentioned it here since I know at least a few HR bloggers out there are reading this and thinking, 'Man I am getting tired of writing about management/leadership/crazy interview tales again'. So there you go, a good reason to try out a bit of a 'stretch assignment'. 

Happy Sunday!

Weekly Wrap Up - May 10-16, 2010

Still in keeping with the recurring theme of trying to break out of the echo chamber and making online content (like this blog) more easily accessible and consumable for those people that will never find their way here to read the blog (see the following crude pie chart below analyzing these populations).

So as you can see from the chart, there is still plenty of 'blue ocean' out there. 

I thought I would start posting each Sunday the summary of the week's posts in Tabbloid format. As you might recall from an earlier post, Tabbloid is a free service that lets you create a custom PDF format 'newspaper' from your selected blogs and other sites RSS feeds, and have that newspaper delivered via email on whatever schedule you choose.

Here is this week's collection of posts, in handy PDF format - Steve's Blog : May 10-16, 2010.

I hope making content accessible in this way is a help to someone out there, I will continue to post these collections on Sundays for the time being.  I hope that if you find them useful, or actually download the PDF and give/send it to someone that otherwise would have never seen these posts, you would take a second and let me know in the comments. 

This is one way to try to break out of the echo chamber, but it is certainly not the only way, and if you have other and better thoughts on how to do this, I would love to hear them.

Happy Sunday!