At a recent IT security event I arrived too early and had to go a few times round the block, sat through several hours of sometimes relevant infosecurity presentations and had to hot-foot it back to the office before they cracked open the booze. So a fairly run-of-the-mill event then. There were a few nuggets of info that did make it worth my while however – notably the risks firms are facing but have no idea about, from data breaches through P2P networks.

"No problem, got that covered," you may say. Ahhhh, but did you think of that contract worker who has been doing some work for your company, and has taken some of it home with him. No? Well, his home PC is also home to his kids' Kazaa P2P app, and the next time they search for Madonna's greatest hits on it, someone could be searching through all those sensitive documents he took away. D'oh!

Well, that's what Howard Schmidt – former White House cyber-security advisor – said, and I'm not one to argue with a man whose former job title included the word "cyber" – think I was traumatised by Dr Who as a child perhaps. Schmidt didn't offer much more advice to firms other than to monitor file-sharing networks to ensure you know what, if any, of your corporate data has been half inched. But then knowing where you stand from a corporate risk point of view is half the battle I suppose. And he also encouraged IT security bods to keep one eye on the whole supply chain, one eye on the enterprise, and another eye on... oh, forget it.