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George always felt much was at stake for him in these sessions. The County Council held the purse strings, and unless George could put on a convincing presentation, the Highways budget would be slashed. Then everyone would start complaining about potholes and stuck traffic lights and dangerous intersections, and blaming him, and life would be miserable for the whole coming year. But when he was introduced that evening, he stood up feeling confident. He had worked six weeks on this presentation and the PowerPoint visuals, which he had tried out on his wife, his top staff people, and some respected friends. Everyone agreed it was his best presentation ever.

The first three PowerPoint images played well. For a change, every Council member was paying attention. He was making his points effectively.

And then all at once everything started going wrong. The fourth image was supposed to be a beautiful photo at sunset of the new highway extension opened last year. Instead it was something else, something very embarrassing. A photograph out of a magazine like Penthouse or Hustler. He could hear the audience gasp as he hurriedly hit the button on his laptop to move to the next image.

This one was worse. Not a thing was left to the imagination.

He was still trying to click to another image when someone in the audience pulled out the power plug to the projector while the chairman banged loudly with his gavel and shouted above the din that the meeting was adjourned.

Analyzing the Con

Using a teenage hackers expertise, a disgruntled employee managed to access the computer of the head of his department, download an important PowerPoint presentation, and replace some of the slides with images certain to cause grave embarrassment. Then he put the presentation back on the man’s computer.

With the modem plugged into a jack and connected to one of the office computers, the young hacker was able to dial in from the outside. The kid had set up the remote access software in advance so that, once connected to the computer, he would have full access to every file stored on the entire system. Since the computer was connected to the organization’s network and he already knew the boss’s username and password, he could easily gain access to the boss’s files.

Including the time to scan in the magazine images, the entire effort had taken only a few hours. The resulting damage to a good man’s reputation was beyond imagining.

mitnick message

The vast majority of employees who are transferred, fired, or let go in a downsizing are never a problem. Yet it only takes one to make a company realize too late what steps they could have taken to prevent disaster.

Experience and statistics have clearly shown that the greatest threat to the enterprise is from insiders. It’s the insiders who have intimate knowledge of where the valuable information resides, and where to hit the company to cause the most harm.

THE PROMOTION SEEKER

Late in the morning of a pleasant autumn day, Peter Milton walked into the lobby of the Denver regional offices of Honorable Auto Parts, a national parts wholesaler for the automobile aftermarket. He waited at the reception desk while the young lady signed in a visitor, gave driving directions to a caller, and dealt with the UPS man, all more or less at the same time.

“So how did you learn to do so many things at once?” Pete said when she had time to help him. She smiled, obviously pleased he had noticed. He was from Marketing in the Dallas office, he told her, and said that Mike Talbott from Atlanta field sales was going to be meeting him. “We have a client to visit together this afternoon,” he explained. “I’ll just wait here in the lobby.”

“Marketing.” She said the word almost wistfully, and Pete smiled at her, waiting to hear what was coming. “If I could go to college, that’s what I’d take,” she said. “I’d love to work in Marketing.”

He smiled again. “Kaila,” he said, reading her name off the sign on the counter, “We