REPUTATION MORE VALUABLE THAN CASH (ASK SONY)


The recent attack (it seems by Anonymous) on SONY which compromised the personal details of almost 100m of their gaming customers has caused massive damage to the SONY brand.   According to Interbrand in 2009 SONY’s brand value was $12bn.   You can safely assume that it will have taken a hit in the order of billions of dollars.  ( This excludes any legal action and the resultant loss.) 

The same could be said of Epsilon and RSA who like SONY did not have a major financial breach but their good names have been severely compromised.   The loss to brand value as well as enterprise value could be massive due to the loss of future business.    (There is a report circulating citing research done on RSA’s customers of whom more than half stated that they would not be renewing their contracts. )    If not obvious before,  then now,  executives charged with the stewardship of large valuable corporations must realize how fragile that value is when faced with the multitude of challenges;   be they natural (tsunamis/earthquakes) or man-made (criminal / terrorism/fraud) or just good old competition.  

In respect of cybercrimes such as phishing and pharming attacks which can lead to either direct financial loss (draining of bank accounts/ theft of credit card details) or reputational damage (per the above) I contend that the latter constitutes a far greater threat than the former.  ( There are those who would argue that the  value of an email address exceeds that of a credit card number in the parallel world of the cybercriminal.)   In respect of individuals this would be in the form of ID theft where personal credentials are used to commit fraud thereby damaging (perhaps irreparably) that persons reputation.     We have seen from the above examples of just how,  a corporation's reputation can be impacted.   A person or a corporation would much rather that money was stolen than their reputation was damaged;   as the latter is very difficult to rebuild and, if so, invariably takes a long time. 

The need for strong authentication in situations where today simple ‘identification’ is used (such as applications using - user name and password / Single Sign On / OpenID) has become an urgent imperative.   Even then those authentication solutions need to be affordable, usable and effective.    Multi-factor solutions such as OOB tokens, OTP keys and browser-based javascript fingerprinting have relied on the browser, user acumen and ‘security by obscurity’ to function.

I believe we will see a steady trend of individuals and corporations demanding better security in the form of two factor authentication  (as a minimum) from their business partners / suppliers and customers.    We have seen many large corporations fall from grace very quickly for many reasons (Arthur Andersen / Enron / WorldCom / Lehman Brothers / Bear Sterns ).  

No corporation can afford to crash or be severely damaged, because they were hacked,  because they did not take their online security seriously.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End of Passwords

Finally it seems … the penny has dropped.   Passwords are a poor substitute for real online security.   There is more and more ‘chatter’ about it.    Robin Henry writing in the Sunday Times on New Years Day talks of the end of ‘password hell’ invoking solutions in the pipeline from the Web Gods – Apple and Google.  The talk is of new biometric solutions such as facial and hand movement recognition.  Even IBM is talking this way.  ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/thestreet/2011/12/20/ibms-tech-predictions-for-the-next-5-years/ )  I agree with the notion that passwords are a dying breed but not that biometrics will become vogue.   They are fraught with problems of their own such as reliability, accuracy and the need for referencing of data-bases ( fail !) .    Why are passwords defunct?   Basically they are difficult to remember and they are easy to steal.    The solutions needed are those that require no cognitive load for the user ( the most unreliable participant in this enterprise
Read more

WIKILEAKS - the fuss?

Why all the fuss ? Why the ‘outrage’ at this ‘threat to national security’ ?   Are we really worried that nuclear war is going to break out because of these ‘dirty’ secrets getting out.  As if the North Koreans are going to up the ante any more than their mock charge of last week because of the abuse and scorn heaped upon them by US Diplomats.  ? !    Come on. To me the irony of this bluster is that it is (largely) from the right wing establishment in the US - calling it treason!     Any party that parades a half wit like Palin as a presidential hopeful hardly holds any moral high ground when it comes to protecting the USA.   Her appointment as the ‘leader of the free World’ will be enough to send any level headed American ( let alone any one of their Allies ) into a panicky tailspin at the thought of what she may stumble into ( by accident or design) . So how did these documents get out there?   Poor security.  Plain and simple.   If the US is so worried about this incident su
Read more

SPOOKS - CYBER ATTACK

Well I’ll be damned – if the subject of my last blog wasn’t the central theme to last nights episode of Spooks – CYBERWAR.    (To those who live outside the UK – Spooks is a very popular TV series about the goings on of a key team inside MI5 who spend their time thwarting terrorist attacks on the UK – while engaging in risqué amorous trysts on the side ).   And so last night we had the Russians and the Chinese –(working together !!) – ganging up on MI5 by infiltrating ( hacking ) their ‘secure’ internal network.     Whether the events portrayed were within the bounds of possibility or credibility who knows?     But if teenagers can break into the Pentagon – then I am sure that Russian/Chinese expert hackers can probably do something along the lines of infiltrating a UK Govt ‘Spooks’ departments network.      Either way it constituted an attack on British soil by foreign ‘combatants’ – which ( if it were true ) would have been a first since the Normans in 1066.   So we saw how vulner
Read more