According to Ed Gibson – EdTheFed on LinkedIn – data that is posted on the internet should be regarded as permanent after 20 minutes, even if the originator has deleted the file.
Gibson, former head of cybersecurity with Microsoft and director of security with PWC Global, said that this is the approach the FBI now takes with internet-posted data, owing to the fact that the data is cached.
"Facebook is the elephant in the room on this front", he said, adding that the advent of web 2.0 services has changed the fed's take on the internet.
"Undergraduates are living and working in a different world to you and I. They live the internet. But they get an awakening after they apply for a job and the first thing their potential employer does is to check out their social media pages", he explained.
Gibson was speaking at Counter Terror Expo in a presentation entitled "Securing cyberspace in an era of global connectivity" and added that, because a growing number of users tap services like Facebook for their email – rather than conventional email services – the whole transaction is effectively in the cloud.
The problem with this, he says, is that networks are not secure any more and, with people scraping data and cybercriminals creating new rogue domains by the thousand – without any form of supervision from the authorities – users have turned in a band of yes people.
"We say yes to end user licence agreements. We scroll down to check boxes. We just get our jobs done, but without giving thought to what information is on the internet, or who originates it", he says.