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Privacy of Bloomberg Mail System

Posted: August 4th, 2005, 2:22 am
by poochie
Can mails I send through Bloomberg be seen by my Firm's IT ?

Privacy of Bloomberg Mail System

Posted: August 4th, 2005, 10:38 am
by DominicConnor
The short answer is yes. Several levels here.Firstly many firms use desktop management s/w that lets them see and type to your screen, sometmies there is an icon that tells you, sometimes there is not.Most BB stuff is sent either encrypted or in proprietary format, so reading it off the wire is hard, and for that reason it will not normally be monitored by corporateanti-virus or compliance scanning s/w. I've not heard of anyone ever getting a virus through BB, so they must scan it, but I know for a fact there is an exploit that would allow a nefarious person to (say) open all your BB linked spreadseets and alter all the interest rates by 20 basis points, just enough to hurt, without being immeidately obvious.BB mail will normally go through the firewall (except for one very large bank), but this will do nothing other than ensure that packets of this type are going toand from a destination that is approved for this form of traffic. In theory, a f/w can be made to log, but volumes of traffic mean this is very rarely used.I've run front office IT gangs so I will share with you that there is a form of words that your IT people can use which will cause BB to give them direct access to your account, including your emails.I of course only ever authorised it for legitimate reasons, and I have no knowledge of this ever being misused...BBers themseolves seem to have very full access to your email, and you should assume that anything you say is not dependant upon BB staff not reading it.If you have a more specific query, feel free to BB me.

Privacy of Bloomberg Mail System

Posted: August 4th, 2005, 6:41 pm
by dc
Bloomberg keeps text files of all your Bloomberg messages. Any company authorized person may request it from Bloomberg with minimal hassle (i.e. write a request on company letterhead with some Bloomberg-required information and fax it to BB) and receive a zipped text file containing your messages for the requested dates in return. In general, I would not use a company workstation for anything (e-mails, browsing, etc.) that I wouldn't be prepared to share with my manager and the company auditor.