Secure Value

Secure Value by Understanding that Cybercrime Increasing Faster than Company Defenses

How are your company's defenses? Don't forget to tend to them as your run and grow your business!

Tonight I read the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey.  "The 2010 CSO CyberSecurity Watch Survey was sponsored by Deloitte and conducted in 2009 in collaboration with CSO Magazine, the U.S. Secret Service, and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon."

The report hit close to home because in the past 30 days we have:

• begun projects with several firms that have had web sites targeted and attacked;
• assisted a firm manage an longstanding employee out of the organization because he had "quit and stayed", taking an offer from a competitor while continuing to "work", explore available confidential information and download it, and;
• developed an incident handling and forensic process for a large Software as a Service (SaaS).

The report is a quick read (16 pages).  I suggest you dive into it and then use it to talk to your HR and IT management to make sure you are properly protected.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey: Cybercrime Increasing Faster Than Some Company Defenses (eon.businesswire.com)
• Report: Companies unprepared for cybercrime (news.cnet.com)
• Companies unprepared for cybercrime (comsecllc.blogspot.com)

Why don't small businesses Secure Value?

We don't build buildings without locks but we do build intellectual, informational and digital assets without locks, why?

I asked a number of people last week:

Regarding Twitter's security breach announced today as an example, how should startups consider information security in their planning?

I got a mix of responses that boiled down to:

• Information security is too complicated, too technical for startups to consider.

• Start ups don't have the capital to invest properly in information security.

In the context of the Twitter story .... one of the founders, first name Jack, had as his username / password combination to use Google apps Jack with the password, password .... the responses do not make sense. 

Twitter has brilliant innovative people working for them who fundamentally understand information technology.  The information security control (read: lock) that wasn't in place would cost $0 as their bad week could have been prevented by a hard to guess user name and a strong password.  In the end it is negligence and a lack of awareness about how important this stuff is (or perhaps awareness that bad things do happen).  How many other startups and growth companies enter the marketplace without proper protections?

Will Twitter Secure Value NOW?

Secure Value by being intentional about security issues from start up on.

Article on TechCrunch disclosing breach of Social Media hot tool Twitter by releasing hacked documents.

Article from TechCrunch discussing start up Twitter's poor security culture as shown by a breach of their business systems. 

UPDATE:

Some words from the old guard media at the New York Times on the issue.