Congratulations to Visa and Mastercard, the latest companies to not notify consumers in a prompt and clear manner, thus inspiring a shrug and a sigh from consumers. No, wait, there isn’t a clear statement, but there is rampant speculation and breathless commentary. It’s always nice to see clear reminders that the way to get people [...]
Mr. Tripathi went to work assembling a crisis team of lawyers and customers and a chief security officer. They hired a private investigator to scour local pawnshops and Craigslist for the stolen laptop. The biggest headache, he says, was deciphering how much about the breach his nonprofit needed to disclose…Mr. Tripathi said he quickly discovered [...]
On their blog, Verisign made the following statement, which I’ll quote in full: As disclosed in an SEC filing in October 2011, parts of Verisign’s non-production corporate network were penetrated. After a thorough analysis of the attacks, Verisign stated in 2011, and reaffirms, that we do not believe that the operational integrity of the Domain [...]
I often say that breaches don’t drive companies out of business. Some people are asking me to eat crow because Vasco is closing its subsidiary Diginotar after the subsidiary was severely breached, failed to notify their reliant parties, mislead people when they did, and then allowed perhaps hundreds of thousands of people to fall victim [...]
There’s an interesting article over at CIO Insight: The disclosure of an email-only data theft may have changed the rules of the game forever. A number of substantial companies may have inadvertently taken legislating out of the hands of the federal and state governments. New industry pressure will be applied going forward for the loss [...]
Over at the Office of Inadequate Security, Pogo was writing about the Lulzsec hacking of Arizona State Police. Her article is “A breach that crosses the line?” I’ve been blogging for years about the dangers of breaches. I am concerned about dissidents who might be jailed or killed for their political views, abortion doctors whose [...]
There’s a very interesting discussion on C-SPAN about the consumer’s right to know about breaches and how the individual is best positioned to decide how to react. “Representative Bono Mack Gives Details on Proposed Data Theft Bill.” I’m glad to see how the debate is maturing, and how no one bothered with some of the [...]
After spending a while crowing about the ChoicePoint breach, I decided that laughing about breaches doesn’t help us as much as analyzing them. In the wake of RSA’s recent breach, we should give them time to figure out what happened, and look forward to them fulfilling their commitment to share their experiences. Right now we [...]
I have fundamental objections to Ponemon’s methods used to estimate ‘indirect costs’ due to lost customers (‘abnormal churn’) and the cost of replacing them (‘customer acquisition costs’). These include sloppy use of terminology, mixing accounting and economic costs, and omitting the most serious cost categories.
You may have heard me say in the past that one of the more interesting aspects of security breaches, for me at least, is the concept of reputation damage. Maybe that’s because I heard so many sales tactics tied to defacement in the 90′s, maybe because it’s so hard to actually quantify brand equity and [...]