Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Attorney Mark D. Rasch is the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s computer crime unit and today serves as Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Consulting at CSC in Virginia.

At just about every major chain, employees have agreed to lengthy nondisclosure agreements, whereby they have agreed not to “disclose” any “confidential information.” The problem is that most employees don’t think of updating their LinkedIn profile as a disclosure. Even more significantly, they don’t think of a lot of their day-to-day operations as confidential information.

Nowhere is this more true than with retail IT talent, talent that is marketed by touting the various applications people have worked on and the specifics of problems they have solved. In LinkedIn, all of those apps and problems/solutions are located right next to their employer’s name. Doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to figure out quite a bit about that chain’s confidential operations. Fear not, though. This information is generally only being read by your direct rivals.

With most NDAs, confidential information has a specific definition and wouldn’t include stuff like, “Hey, I am a Unix guru.” This really isn’t an issue about violation of an NDA (OK, sometimes it is); it is about good operational security. For that, users need better education and training about the risks of disclosure, the company needs to decide what it wants to protect, and the chain needs to be vigilant about appropriately trolling social networking sites for public information about themselves or their partners that might cause harm.

This process, called Open-Source Monitoring, must be done well and done legally (with respect for privacy) or it can be a public relations and legal nightmare. But when done well, Open-Source Monitoring can give a retailer advance (or at least real-time) information about a potential data leak.

Let’s face it. Just about everything happening in your company is being posted online by someone. A store clerk just ate a tasty burrito—wham! It’s on her Twitter feed. A fire drill causes employees to stand in the cold for 10 minutes, and poof! Not only is it on someone’s Facebook site, but there’s a picture of shivering executives. Much of this information is harmless. But much of it is not.

Cyberthieves, competitors, fans and others are constantly trolling social networking sites for information they can use to learn what you are doing. If Apple hires a new employee with expertise in interactive displays (as evidenced by the employee’s change in his or her LinkedIn profile), then the world (and Apple’s competitors) know something is up with a new product that might have interactive displays. If the CEOs of two companies post identical locations at Foursquare, then could a secret merger chat have just been revealed? If a technical person posts his or her previous position (system architect, Sears), with skills and responsibilities (designed a Web-based payment and inventory system using C++, which integrated inventory and cost modeling with blah, blah, blah), a good social engineer can use this information to learn exactly what type of system and services a competitor is about to start using.