Typically, I am not a fan of Newsweek but I was drawn to this story from the Drudge Report link – Intrigue In High Places. This long article discusses HP’s chairwoman Patricia Dunn’s use of data mining to catch a leaker from the HP board of directors. The whole sordid affair sounds like a movie plot.
According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors – not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones.
That’s my emphasis above and I am still shocked. Apparently the security company used “pretexting” to get the personal phone records of all of the board members. Remember, this isn’t their HP phones, this is there home phones and personal cell phones.
In case you were unaware of pretexting (I had never heard of it):
That practice, according to the Federal Trade Commission, involves using “false pretenses” to get another individual’s personal nonpublic information: telephone records, bank and credit-card account numbers, Social Security number and the like. Pretexting is heavily marketed on the Web.
Typically – say in the case of a phone company – pretexters call up and falsely represent themselves as the customer; since companies rarely require passwords, a pretexter may need no more than a home address, account number and heartfelt plea to get the details of an account.
Well, I would sure like to see the organizational development specialist who wants to tackle this company culture!