If you work for a credit union, this article about how easy it is for someone to compromise your network should strike fear in your heart. Our friend Brad Garland of The Garland Group sent it our way this morning.

As a test, a company scattered 20 flash drives around the parking lot and smoking areas of a credit union early one morning. Of those 20, 15 were picked up by employees and inserted into USB drives on credit union computers, unleashing a “Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us.”

Plus, the employees knew a test was coming.

Educate every member of your staff about this before you learn it the hard way. Once that data’s out there, you can’t get it back. This story’s flying around the Internet, by the way, so expect every data thief from here to Moscow to catch on quickly.

^{Update: If you’d like proof of the popularity of this story, check out any of the 100-plus comments on its Digg page. Comments like this, for example.}