George speaks aloud on a mobile phone on the train from Turin to Rome, Italy. He states his name and his initials are also on his luggage tag. He speaks of money, houses, restructuring. He seems to be handling a lot of money with aplomb. Very likely, it is not his own money.

He calls his mother to greet her and it seems that he is asking for money. An observer surmises he is obviously an ambitious young man, but perhaps also a rascal? He talks to friends and to his mother of pending contracts that would put a considerable amount of money at his disposal and advises his mother that, in the meantime, she should wait with anticipation.

The observer assumes that he deals with finances; more precisely, in speculative investments—perhaps for wealthy investors who want to leverage their assets or something related to money laundering. It makes one think of the Italian Parioli Madoff: a man who tried to emulate the “original” Bernie Madoff and is now spending the rest of his life in jail. It is an automatic comparison.

He states in his phone call that he is going to Milan, his home city. The observer now has enough information to begin intelligence work via the Internet. For added security, the observer waits until George gets off the train.

One can find almost anything on the Internet such as Linkedin, Facebook and a host of others. It takes only a little searching. And everything that is on the Internet remains there forever without any chance of eradication.

To this end;Privacy is threatened every day, not only when users are online, but in real life. Everything a person does can be used to gather private information about him/her, and the wide usage of mobile phones makes the situation even worse.

In view of the above, organizations can help fight privacy invaders by teaching their employees how to protect themselves when talking about their job and when online, but the first line of defence remains the individual. Individuals must always consider that everything they say is heard by others, and, perhaps those “others” are not all friendly. The Internet accelerates information retrieval and correlation.

So how do you protect yourself or your organization from these threats of intruding into our privacy?

The best advice is to be a CISA (Certified Information System Auditor) & know how to:
- Use a virtual private network (VPN), which passes Internet traffic through different servers around the world.

- Alternatively—or together with a VPN—use TOR. TOR encrypts and bounces Internet traffic through different servers, making it difficult, but not impossible, to track.

- Use an encrypted message application. Although the content of a person’s chats in Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp can be accessed only by hacking your phone, it might be advisable to start using a more secure messaging app to ensure that what is stored on the various servers is not accessible.

- Think about why it is desirable to stay private. It is important that people think about what data they have, what data they want to protect, how likely it is that that data could get into the wrong hands and how serious that would be if it happened.

- Protect passwords. Change them often and do not use the same password for all accounts.

- And stop playing with global positioning systems (GPS) and other devices that let the entire world know where you are and with whom.

- And many more.

So, Don’t hesitate to subscribe to our Online CISA Lecture towards taking your CISA exam. For more details, call/whataspp: 07019402526