Nadia Yousef: CISO Lens Country Manager addresses safety concerns surrounding ministers using personal emails for Government work

Education Minister Erica Stanford is not alone in forwarding Parliament and ministerial emails to her personal account - with Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop revealing they're guilty of similar acts.

The Cabinet Manual says ministers should avoid using personal mobile and email accounts wherever possible.

 CISO Lens Country Manager Nadia Yousef says Webmail services like Gmail can be safe if you use a strong password multi-factor authentication - but it's not an appropriate tool for Government use.

"Long, strong and unique passwords - it's something we talk about all the time and everyone's absolutely sick of hearing it - but they are the silver bullet with multi-factor."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It turns out that both Niko Lawless and christ Bishop
have also been doing the same thing as Erica Stanford
and using their personal email accounts for the government communications
they're not supposed to. Obviously, it's a breach of the
Cabinet manual. Nadia Yousef is a data security expert with
the SISO lensing with US. Now. Hey, Nadia, hi, how
are you? I'm very well, thank you. How unsafe is this?

(00:21):
How much is the stressing you out?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well? This is I think this is really interesting and
we saw a lot of talk about this obviously in
Hillary Clinton's campaign as well. You know, there's a lot
of talk about Gmail, and I think what's really important
to address is that web mail providers like Gmail and
Outlook aren't actually insecure services. If you use them with
a strong and unique password and multi factor authentication, it's
just not the best mechanism for you know, government information

(00:48):
to be shared through.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
I thought that they didn't have end to end encryption
and that that was material to this whole thing.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
What happens in the back end is you know, a
little bit a little bit different for for everything. But
the really important the reason that these organizations have it
teams that provide you know, their own internal networks and
things like that, is so that they can keep control
of these documents and they can understand who's accessing them.
They can make sure that all users have good, strong

(01:16):
passwords and multi factor set up as well, so you know,
organizations like this have control over these kinds of documents
and an audit trail when they're kept on their own system,
which is why they don't all use their personal email.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I see now, Nadia. So for me, as just a
punter out there, I thought that WhatsApp was the most
secure and if you were going to send you know,
dodgy texts at dodgy messages, you want to use the
WhatsApp are not the Gmail? Have I been completely misled
this whole time?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I would say that they're all third party provided services,
and we've seen over the last few years that you know,
lots of different services have been compromised at lots of
different times. So I would say nothing is infallible and
once it's being sent over the Internet, it should be
considered that way. And say that long, strong and unique passwords,
and it's something we talk about all the time and
everyone's absolutely sick of hearing it, but they are the

(02:06):
silver bullet with multi factor, that's the thing that will
keep you most secure of anything.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Nadia, thank you very much. Nadia Usef Siso, Len's country
manager and data security expert. Hang on toch Heeather, wasn't
Nikola Willis on the record last night on your show
saying she doesn't really send emails. Yes, she was, Chris,
but we've already talked about that. She has gone back
and realized she did send one email, just the one
from the work account to the private account, in order
to print it in the hotel room. That's what happened there.

(02:35):
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