This morning CUNA News Now ran the following article: PCUA warns about sharing disks, USB thumb drives. I’m not usually one to criticize the length of the news cycle in the CU industry (at least not in public), but the article this press release was based on first appeared on June 7 and we wrote about it on the 8th.

For normal news, this isn’t that big of a deal. However, information thieves thrive on the gap between when they discover a cracking technique and when the industry learns to protect itself from it.

Credit unions have a tremendous opportunity to leverage their cooperative structure (and not just cooperative in the “member-owned” sense) to rapidly share ideas, best practices, and the occasional “hey tell your employees not to use a USB thumb drive unless they are certain of its contents.” Hopefully the rise of blogs in the CU industry will help that.