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Life of PII

From: Jasmine Platt, DMV STaR Team

Part of what makes the DMV so unique is the amazing relationships we maintain with our customers and the important information we maintain for these individuals and organizations in the course of business.

However, managing customers’ personally identifying information (PII) – including payment card industry (PCI) data – poses significant risks and challenges. Figures provided by CyberSecurity indicate that over the last 90 days, ITD has detected 233 malicious files. In the last 24 hours, approximately 1,000 attempts were made to bypass our firewall… and five attempts were made to log in to the DMV’s publicly accessible servers using default credentials!

But when the going gets tough, the tough innovate.

Staff from all business units of the DMV have been working together to develop optimal solutions for improving the security of our safety-sensitive data, leading to four recently implemented innovations in the areas of policy, procedure, and technology.

These innovations include improving the policy for PII and constructing an all new PCI policy, adding Confidentiality Notices to all DMV email through the Outlook Exchange server, disabling of Outlook Web Access (OWA) for group email boxes, and establishing a new set of procedures for handling these sensitive emails – all with the goals of maximized security, responsiveness, and continued excellence in customer service at heart.

None of these innovations would have come to fruition without the help of our many talented and knowledgeable friends in ETS; special thanks go out to CyberSecurity’s Joshua Stemp and Brian Reed, Greg Christensen, Mark Borkowski, Nathan Lewis, Janet French, and the Information Management Governance Board for their contributions and inspiration.

But the fight is far from over! Together, the DMV and ETS will continue to partner their skills and abilities to craft innovative solutions to the common business problems PII and PCI can pose throughout the department. We look forward to working with you on more innovations soon!