Email nightmare for some FSU students

shieldI mentioned yesterday that sometimes people and software screw up in ways that cause problems. Today I saw an article demonstrating just how bad these issues can be. Florida State University Housing Department sent detailed and confidential violation reports to tens of thousands of students.

On Monday, March 14 at around 2 p.m., FSU first became aware that a glitch in the University Housing software caused the system to email approximately 13,195 current and former FSU students detailed incident reports of any and all code of conduct complaints associated with them, the FSView has learned. FSU News

In some cases, reports were of minor issues like halogen lights or open flames. But in other cases the violations were much more serious. These include reports of drug offenses, harassment and assault. Emails were only sent to the students associated with the report, but there is the possibility that some anonymous reporters were revealed by this glitch. Given some of the reports were more than 10 years old, it’s also possible these emails went to non-involved recipients.
As an email professional this type of glitch is horrifying. I can’t fathom what the glitch was. Whether it involved a human making a mistake or was triggered by the software, this is horrible design. No email containing sensitive and personal information should ever be sent unintentionally.
FSU reports they’ve stopped using the software. I hope they’ve unplugged it from any network completely. A little bit of poking at Google doesn’t tell me who the vendor is, although one of the major campus conduct software vendors (Maxient) has a note on their Facebook page that they are not the software used by FSU.
Like I said yesterday, stuff breaks online. The problem is some of these failures can cause problems and injury to real people. What happens online isn’t that separate from what happens offline these days. Our security needs to be better.

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Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees?
In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job.
This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have walked out of a company with customer mailing lists, and I’m sure there are other incidents.
ESPs should take action to prevent employees from stealing customer data.

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Fast and loose

Politicians often play fast and loose with permission and data. This can cause them all sorts of problems with email delivery at major ISPs. I really expect that politicians buy, sell, transfer, spindle, mutilate and fold data. If they can use it to further their goals, they will. And, many of the consumer protection and privacy laws don’t apply to political groups.
The news that Representative Bachman may have known that some of her mailing list was taken and used by others is a surprise even to me. I talked with a few ESP reps, though, and they told me that this was mostly par for the course and that they often have a lot of delivery and compliance issues with their political clients. Many have had to suspend or terminate political clients, and a couple people mentioned SBL listings.
This isn’t a problem with just one side of the political spectrum, it seems endemic in how the game is played.
 
 

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December 2015: The month in email

December2015_blogHappy 2016! We enjoyed a bit of a break over the holidays and hope you did too. Here’s our December wrap up – look for a year-end post later this week, as well as our predictions for the year ahead. I got a bit of a head start on those predictions in my post at the beginning of December on email security and other important issues that I think will dominate the email landscape in 2016.
DMARC will continue to be a big story in 2016, and we’re starting to see more emphasis on DMARC alignment as a significant component of delivery decisions. I wrote a bit more on delivery decisions and delivery improvement here.
December in the world of email is all about the holidays, and this year was no exception. We saw the usual mix of retailers creating thoughtful experiences (a nice unsubscribe workflow) and demonstrating not-so-great practices (purchased list fails). We took a deeper look at the impacts and hidden costs of list purchasing – as much as companies want to expand their reach, purchased lists rarely offer real ROI. And on the unsubscribe front, if you missed our discussion and update on unroll.me unsubs, you may want to take a look.
Steve wrote a detailed post looking at what happens when you click on a link, and how you can investigate the path of a clickthrough in a message, which is useful when you’re trying to prevent phishing, fraud, and other spam. In other malicious email news, the CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown.
In other industry news, some new information for both ESPs and recipients interested in feedback loops and a somewhat humorous look at the hot-button issues that divide our ranks in the world of email marketing. Please share any we may have missed, or any other topics you’d like us to address.

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