Statement Security Question

"In an attempt to prove the press and public furore over the 2007 UK child benefit data scandal was a fuss about nothing, he published his own bank account number and sort code, together with instructions on how to find out his address, in The Sun newspaper, expecting nobody to be able to remove money from his account. He later discovered that someone had been able to set up a monthly direct debit for £500 to Diabetes UK, and this person's identity was protected from the bank under the Data Protection Act 1998.[26][27]" -- Wikipedia.com 12/2/2010

Personally, I dislike sending any personal information over the Internet in an unencrypted form. Even e-mail is highly insecure unless it is encrypted.

My 2 cents.

A difference in exposure level of perhaps hundreds vs. hundreds of millions, a million-fold increase in risk.

Don't they teach mathematical probability in schools anymore?

Apparently they don't, at least not in any school YOU attended.

Yikes! I should be more careful with my terminology and assumptions when I'm swimming in sharx-infested waters :-)

I have an eagle eye for bull s*it, Jerry!

I should have been a bit more clear in that there are only 11 townhomes in our community and on our group site. Figure double that number for partners and spouses and it is not millions who are accessing. I would not post to a public board.

Still, I decided not to post the statements but for reporting purposes. I am afraid someone will see the amount in our checking account and assume that is spendable. One has to look at forecasted expenses and prepaid HOA fees as well.

Why not place Quicken-generated reports to your public domain and have the 'real' hardcopy statements at meetings in person? I assume at some point, you also provide them to some form of auditors or auditing committee. This is what I do for an NPO that I am the treasurer to. Anyone is free to view the bank statements at meetings, but I wouldn't post them in the "media". Just a thought.

Mr. Jan,

You're forgetting about Google and other search engines and web bots that crawl the Internet and then index the data that they find. Everything on the Internet is public unless it's encrypted, password-protected, or otherwise privatized.

For example, if a book club posts the names, addresses, TNs and email addresses of its members in a PDF file on their "private" web site, Google will eventually find and index that data. A potential ID thief can then do a name search of one of the members using Google and be led to the name, address, TN and email address of all the members of that club. Email addresses, in turn, are used as login names for many commercial web sites. An ID thief, armed with all this personal info, can often convince a service rep to reset the password for a commercial site, change the shipping address for that account, and then order merchandise at your expense.

In your case, ID thieves might be led to your web site by searching for the name of one of your owners, which may appear elsewhere on your site.

I can't really argue with those who think the above worries are paranoid - sites do have security measures, especially against such simple schemes. But on the Internet your data is exposed to organized criminal gangs with much more powerful tools and methods. I personally think it's better to be safe than sorry.

Jerry

I should have been a bit more clear in that there are only 11 townhomes in our community and on our group site. Figure double that number for partners and spouses and it is not millions who are accessing. I would not post to a public board.

Still, I decided not to post the statements but for reporting purposes. I am afraid someone will see the amount in our checking account and assume that is spendable. One has to look at forecasted expenses and prepaid HOA fees as well.

If the number of people who have access to data is multiplied by a million (a not unreasonable assumption when you put unprotected data on the Internet), and an equal percentage of people in each population can be expected to successfully use that data for identity theft (an unsubstantiated assumption, mea culpa), then you get a million-fold increase in the expected number of identity thieves (a logical conclusion for which "risk" may be a poor choice of terminology).

The message is that you usually shouldn't put unprotected personal data on the Internet, ever if that data is already publicly available to hundreds of people, because it may constitute an enormous increase in the risk of identity theft. My apologies if you don't like the way I tried to make this point.

P.S. I truly appreciate your eagle eye for BS, even when it's used against me. It's just a shame that it's accompanied by a mole's eye for manners, although even the latter can be quite entertaining at times.

Which is why the HOA I manage only posts PDFs of documents (directories, financial data, etc) that are image only (i.e. do not have searchable text embedded) and have generic file names. While it's possible to OCR those documents to recover the text after they've been downloaded, it does prevent mass indexing of the content.

My HOA's PDF document apparently *is* text-based because it *has* been indexed by Google.

I'm not sure what their source is or how they generated it, but it probably started as an Excel spreadsheet. I myself have never generated any PDF documents, but both I and my HOA would be extremely grateful if you can explain how to get our PDF into image-only form. I agree that this reduces the security risk by orders of magnitude.

Jerry

It depends on what software you use to create the PDF. If you Google "image only pdf" you'll see lots of links. It doesn't look like Office 97 allows image only PDF saves, so you have to either use a PDF driver that does have that option or convert the PDF file after its been created.

In our case, I take a .pdf that's been created by Microsoft Office, open it in the full version of Adobe Acrobat and then print it again. One of the advanced print options inside Acrobat is image only. If you are using the Adobe Acrobat print driver from within Office you should be able to do the same thing and skip the reprinting.

This has the side effect of making it difficult to directly copy and paste the text from the PDF to another document which may or may not be desireable. However, the image only PDF can be OCR'd by someone to recover the text.

Another less secure option is to place a robots.txt file in web directories you do not want indexed. The more reputable search engines will honor this request. Your webmaster should know how to do this - detailes here:

One other comment - I would not include or fuzz out any account numbers. There's no reason your members need to know that and bad guys could use that information.

It is simpler to take a screen image which is usually a jpg and email that using BCC.

I assume the HOA has to purchase a copy of Adobe Acrobat to create the PDF but then everyone else can read the file with free versions of Adobe Reader and that these are available for both PCs and Macs. Is this correct? If so, this looks like a good approach.

Not a problem. Our webmaster has the text image version and could easily provide it to trusted others who need it.

Good to know, but totally inadequate against malicious bots.

We're pretty new and naive in this matter, but I don't think we'd make this mistake. Such data has no social value to our community-at-large and has no business on our site.

Thanks a million to you Robert, and to Mr.Jan for posting this very useful [to me] issue, and to "The Shark" for trying to keep me honest.

Jerry

Yes, but Acrobat Pro is not cheap. There are much less expensive PDF creators out there (like Foxit, PDFCreator, etc), but I haven't checked to see if they have an image only option.

Well, the original question really was to ask why this was dangerous when a check had the same information but I do like the debate and suggestions.

One has to be admitted to our Yahoo group and non-group members cannot access the data. You can discuss the security around Yahoo groups but that is the way it is supposed to work. Thus, I would not be posting to the internet at large and I would be using the PDF file generated by the bank as a monthly statement.

I agree that I should only post the financial reports but my reason is more to provide information instead of giving raw data and answering a ton of questions later.

I don't want to "fuzzy" the account numbers (If I was still going to post) because, if I can fuzzy the account numbers, I can probably play with the other items on the document as well. It defeats my purpose. I could print it out, cover the account number with tape, scan the document, and upload the PDF.

We don't have an "audit committee". One of the reasons I am asking these questions is I want to put some financial controls in place, document them, and get them into the by laws.

Mr. Jan

Given the size of our community someone should already have a copy of Acrobat. If not, thanks for the other options, Robert.

Jerry