Not the best way to start a presentation…
The IT guys I’ve met in my career have all been very nice people. Admittedly they all seem to be slightly mad and do tend to talk in a strange language with lots of mentions of “coding this and coding that”.
To be fair though they all probably think I’m slightly mad when I talk to fellow finance people in my strange language about “SOCI this and SOFP that”.
If you talk to your IT colleagues though one thing that they tend to take very seriously is the level of security.
Now whilst there are lots of higher level security precautions present such as firewalls and anti-virus programmes there are also some more simple precautions that you should take.
Memory sticks (or USB or flash drives as they are sometime known) can all contain confidential documents and most memory sticks are not password protected.
It pays to double check what’s on the memory stick you’re carrying around with you in case it contains confidential documents and you lose it.
In a similar vein it’s always worth checking what other files are on your flash drive if you’re about to make a presentation.
Unfortunately for Father Martin McVeigh, a Catholic priest in Northern Ireland, he didn’t check what other files were on the flash drive he was going to use when he recently did a presentation to some parents of children at a local primary school.
According to media reports, whilst loading up his presentation for the parents, Father McVeigh inadvertently showed a slideshow of indecent pornographic images onto a screen.
The x-rated slideshow was on the memory stick that Father McVeigh had put into the computer to load up his intended presentation.
Father McVeigh was understandably a bit shocked at seeing the naked pictures on the screen (although to be fair probably not as shocked as the parents in the audience were) and according to the BBC website he was “visibly shaken” and “bolted out of the room”.
He later stated that he didn’t know how the images got onto the memory stick.
And the morale of the story?
Well, I guess that IT security is not just the higher level technical areas but also the more simple areas such as making sure you know what else is on your memory stick…
