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ISPs now keep your history for 12 months

Monday 6th April 2008 was the date that a new EU directive was forced upon all UK Internet Service Providers (ISP) to keep a record of all your email, internet and other online communications for the previous 12 months.  This communication tracking database is enforced by the UK Government and paid for by the UK taxpayer.

ISPs now have to record and store who has sent an email to whom, and which websites their customers have visited – all with timestamps.

Bodies which are covered by phone tap law the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) will be able to request a court order for the release of the data.

They say that no content is to be recorded, only…

IP Address History: ISPs will be forced to retain data on what communications were made from which internet protocol (IP) address or phone number, what the destination of that communication was, and its duration.

Mobile phone calls: include information on which cell within a network a call was made from. This will give authorities an indication of the user’s location at the time of the call.

Web History: the addresses of web pages visited do not need to be stored under the new rules. For internet access, ISPs only need to store the dates and times of a user connecting to the internet and disconnecting; the internet protocol (IP) address allocated to the user; and the user ID of the customer.

Email Messages: sender and recipient(s) addresses and time of all messages – together with IP Address.

[Author Comment: There has been no released details as to whether the 'Subject Title' of email messages are also recorded]

The Reason For this new law:  national securty and anti-terrorism measures – fair enough.  But to allow local governments to ‘catch fly-tippers’.  I am not a fly-tipper, and do not know anyone who has confessed verbally, so why would they start to confess online?  Is there an online confession box that I do not know about?  Bet you that other ‘debt-management-chasing’ companies will register to gain access to this new database to allow them to start chasing consumers with bad credit histories whom cannot be found by any other method.

All it takes is a formal request using the RIP Act to get access to these details.

Written on 08 April 2009 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Monitoring, News with Comments Off

Three Irishmen joke turns into 30 BT Staff…

30 staff at BT face being sacked for e-mailing a ‘light-hearted’ joke which poked fun at the Irish.

The BT call centre workers have been suspended after a colleague complained the joke could be viewed as racist.

Managers at BT are now investigating the claim but employees have accused them of using the incident as an excuse to cut staffing levels without making payoffs.

Read more at Metro

Written on 24 February 2009 by Dicontas Blog Admin under News with Comments Off
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Media Interest Increases 15% In Employment Disputes

Almost every day there seems to be yet another high profile employment case in the newspapers. Why is this? Well, firstly there are more cases going through the Employment Tribunals, where an increase of 15% was recorded in the most recent figures published. Given the economic climate it can only be expected that the number will rise again in 2009.

Generally speaking, employment disputes attract media coverage because they have a very strong human element which is attractive to Editors, who understand what their readers are interested in and relate to. Typically, the claimant will be portrayed by the media as something of a David battling a corporate Goliath and taking on deeply entrenched vested interests.

The media will usually focus on alleged wrong doings by the employer, how the employee claims to have been treated, the perceived culture of the workplace, allegations of extreme bad behaviour such as drug abuse and, of course, whatever sum they decide to report as being claimed money-wise.

Allegations of sexual misconduct would also feature in these stories, were it not for ET rules and the issuance of Restricted Reporting Orders (RROs) in such cases. If the defendant in question is a household name, such as a bank, a FTSE 100 company or a celebrity, then you can expect media interest to intensify dramatically.

Even a cursory news search will reveal numerous examples of how the media feed off employment disputes. Mona Awad, a Muslim bank manager who claims she was accused of trying to sleep her way to the top is suing Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) for damages of £16.7m for sex, race and religious discrimination. This was widely reported in the national newspapers, both tabloid and broadsheet. The case is being dealt with by Nottingham Employment Tribunal.

Read more from Mondaq

Written on 24 February 2009 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Law & Legal Issues, News with Comments Off
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Email libel costs £110k for University

A single email message has cost the University of Salford £110,000 after it alleged fraud in an expenses claim. Dr Tom McMaster, a lecturer in business management at Salford University, submitted an expense claim of £180 after receiving permission to sail his boat to a conference in Galway rather than fly.

However, after submitting his claim he received a response from the accounts department:

“Clearly the original claim was an attempted fraud and appropriately rejected.”

“Those who submitted and certified it should be ashamed of themselves.”

However, the email message was also sent to other members of his department and as a result constituted libel.

McMaster took the case to the High Court to clear his name. After failing to have the case dismissed, the university settled out of court for £10,000 but will have to pay up to £100,000 in costs.

A spokeswoman for Salford University said: “The university has reached a settlement with Dr McMaster and we cannot comment on any outstanding grievance issues concerning him.”

The case highlights the importance of following correct email procedure and the vulnerability of organisations to action if it is not followed.

Had the email message been sent solely to Dr. McMaster there would have been no case to answer but by distributing it to others the organisation opened itself up to libel action.

Original Post from vnunet.com

Written on 26 August 2008 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Law & Legal Issues with Comments Off
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Nearly 50% of UK firms fire abusive emailers

Almost half of UK companies have dismissed employees over the past year due to e-mail abuse and over half regularly keep tabs on employees’ use of e-mail to make sure they remain compliant with company policy, a survey has found.

The survey also found that nearly half of the UK’s companies conducted investigations into e-mail leaks of confidential or sensitive data over the same period. These figures show that UK companies are more suspicious of and more rigorous in checking employees’ use of e-mail than their counterparts in Germany and France.

Research carried out by Forrester on behalf of e-mail security firm Proofpoint found that 44% of UK companies had fired employees in the past year because of violation of e-mail policies while 78% of them had disciplined workers for the same offence.

It also found that 53% of UK companies surveyed regularly audited outbound e-mail content while 47% have investigated a leak in the last year.

Companies’ principal worries about e-mail use are that employees could be breaking financial disclosure or corporate governance rules, could be leaking intellectual property or trade secrets, could be leaking sensitive memos or could be breaching privacy regulations.

The report highlights “the convenience and ubiquity of e-mail as a business communications tool” and acknowledges that e-mail has “exposed enterprises to a wide variety of legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email”. The report continues, “Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies.”

Written on 02 June 2008 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Compliance, Surveys with Comments Off
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Email Compliance and the use of Email Filtering

Email compliance is a necessary corporate objective to ensure that email communication remains free of inappropriate materials that may damage or strain the relationships between your workforce.  Many managers see the protection against viruses, spyware and email spam as being the highest priority and they are there are a plethora of tools to enable companies to do this pretty well – as this is a mature market, but some organisations overlook content filtering.

Email filtering is a tool to allow both inbound and outbound emails to be scanned for abusive materials that are likely to break existing ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ statements and runs the risk of upsetting staff that read and are hurt or angered by the proliferation of such inappropriate content.

IT Managers have three solutions to implement email filtering: namely, a managed service where emails are scanned whilst travelling between the company and the internet; a server appliance, where emails are scanned within the company network and is automatically configured to run immediately; or a email server add-on program, which is installed, configured and manually maintained by the companies IT department and either installed on the email server or on another dedicated server .  All three solutions are viable for most modern organisations, but the managed service option has most effective content filter as its algorithm for detecting inappropriate content is constantly updated in line with real-time attacks that are happening over many of its own client base.  The effectiveness of the other two in-house solutions depend on the skills of the companies IT department and the email filtering vendors capacity to keep its scanning engine up to date with the latest rules to identify and stop the latest inappropriate content.

Written on 31 December 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Compliance with No Comments
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Email spam – becoming sound practice!

MessageLabs has warned that spammers are already modifying their tactics when it comes to the emerging trend of using audio rather than text attachments in unsolicited mail.

In a statement, MessageLabs claimed that, following the first spam campaign involving audio files on 17 October 2007, which attempted to control the value of stock for “nefarious reasons”, spammers are now moving on from simply attaching audio to mail to linking through to content hosted on multimedia sites such as YouTube.

“This recent trend proves that spamming techniques are becoming more innovative,” said MessageLabs in its statement. “As image spam shifts from email attachments to images on free image-hosting sites, [we] believe that it is only a matter of time before the spammers apply the same approach to audio spam and upload the message to free multimedia-hosting sites such as YouTube, Google Video and MySpace.”

Spammers used attached MP3 music files to try to “sneak messages past spam filters”, said MessageLabs. The spam run of 15 million emails lasted 36 hours and used Storm worm-infected computers for the purposes of dissemination, MessageLabs said.

The MP3 file names were music-related, including files called “beatles.mp3″, “britney.mp3″ and “elvis.mp3″. They contained a poor-quality, 25-second voice track promoting a stock offering from Exit Only Incorporated for its Text4Cars.com website. The spam did not contain any detected malicious code.

Written on 07 November 2007 by Dicontas Blog Admin under Email Security News with No Comments
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