Your organization's responsibility is not to ban ids.xls outright (that will fail), but to every instance of it. Treat every ids.xls file as a potential canary in the coal mine—a small file that canary reveal large-scale security gaps.
Next time you see ids.xls on a shared drive or in an email attachment, pause. Ask: Do I know exactly what IDs are in here, who put them there, and why? ids.xls
SELECT * FROM Orders WHERE Order_ID IN (SELECT * FROM [ids.xls]) While often benign, ids.xls is also a red flag in cybersecurity investigations. Attackers and malicious insiders love this naming convention because it is inconspicuous. 1. Data Exfiltration (The Insider Threat) An employee about to leave a company might copy a sensitive list of customer IDs, user IDs, or product serial numbers into an ids.xls file and email it externally or save it to a USB drive. Why? Because "ids" sounds generic and technical, it rarely triggers immediate suspicion. Your organization's responsibility is not to ban ids
If the answer is no, you have just found your next security or compliance project. Keywords: ids.xls, spreadsheet security, Excel file analysis, data exfiltration, macro malware, OLE file forensics, identifier management. Ask: Do I know exactly what IDs are