Posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Private Customer Data Vulnerable During Application Testing
CIO
Sixty-two percent of companies surveyed by the Ponemon Institute report that during the application development and testing process, they use real customer data—including employee, vendor and customer records, and credit card and Social Security numbers—instead of disguised data to test applications.
That data often isn’t protected in a non-production environment, according to the report. Thus iit could be vulnerable to unauthorized sources including in-house testing staff, consultants, partners and offshore personnel. The latter is particularly notable, since 52 percent of the companies outsourced application testing, and 49 percent of those respondents shared live data with the outsourced organization.
