Financial Management Institute of Canada - Notice on Delegate Gifts

Professional Development Week 2009 Delegates

It has been brought to the attention of the Financial Management Institute (fmi*igf) that a few of the PD Week 2009 delegate gift pens with USB-Flash Drives may have contained a virus in the memory stick. Upon receiving these delegate observations, fmi*igf has taken the following steps to assess the extent and potential cause of the virus on the USB memory stick:

fmi*igf contacted the supplier who confirmed that that “all the pens and USB/flash drive orders were manufactured at a secure facility and the process included a sample check of the disk drives as well as all components were checked and scanned over at the manufacturing site” prior to delivery to the Hilton Lac-Leamy Conference site.
fmi*igf contracted an independent to professionally conduct a virus scan of a non-statistical sample of pens remaining in fmi*igf inventory after the conference. This independent check revealed that 8% of the pens examined did contain a virus.

Given the observations of two conference delegates and our independent examination, we are unfortunately confident that a small number of our PD Week 2009 delegates gift pens contain a virus on the USB-Flash drive. While the actual infection is determined by Symantec to be “low risk”, we must advise PD Week 2009 delegates who have not yet used their USB-Flash Drive pen to refrain from using the memory stick in order to mitigate this risk completely. The Financial Management Institute of Canada sincerely regrets this situation and offers our utmost apologies.