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When a company’s online security system is breached, it’s usually the top executives who get blamed. If you’re worried that you might end up in the line of fire, make sure to avoid a crisis like this one by taking the proper precautions.
Amy Pascal, Katherine Archuleta, and Stephen Fletcher have one thing in common: all three were top executives who took the fall after digital security breaches crippled their high-profile companies.
Breached
On May 15, 2012, Utah governor Gary Herbert announced that State CIO Steve Fletcher would be stepping down. The end of his career came early thanks to a breach that exposed mountains of personal data, including the social security numbers of 280,000 Medicaid recipients. How?
Well, Governing.com claims that the data was stolen from a poorly-secured server. And Fletcher could only reply, “Until you have a breach, nobody really wants to step up and pay extra money for security.”
Amy Pascal, chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), also resigned after her personal emails to a slew of colleagues came to light in 2014 as part of a massive online breach of data.
Pascal might not be directly to blame for the breach that exposed unreleased films, thousands of emails, and the personal information of thousands of Sony Pictures employees, but evidence suggests that the company’s senior management blatantly ignored a series of advance warnings.
In 2007, Allan Holmes argued that Sony’s then-executive director of information security, Jason Spaltro, ignored the grave warnings of a security auditor.
Finally, Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta stepped down earlier this year after a digital security breach exposed the details of millions of current and prospective government employees. And her resignation mercifully came to fruition thanks to the insistence of 20 different lawmakers that she be relieved of her duties.
Though the breach was discovered last June, investigators believe it to have first occurred over a year before that — a ridiculous length of time given the clear warnings the Office Of The Inspector General received about its poor data security.
Be Prepared
Archuleta, Pascal and Fletcher all attempted at first to weather the storm of criticism, but when you’re implicated in the exposure of millions of people’s personal information, chances are that the storm will prove too great. Public apologies and after-the-fact security upgrades are simply too little, too late.
The best way to safeguard data belonging to your company, customers, and employees is to hire real professionals to routinely assess your online security and safety practices, then implement the strongest measures tailored to your specific needs.
And Integrated Security Services offers the most complete online security solution on the market, as our data forensics experts offer a free consultation to establish the scope of your security needs.
We then prepare an engagement letter to estimate the budget and time needed to secure your info — once the terms have been negotiated, your data is thoroughly analyzed by top industry professionals. The end result? A fully secure network.
Integrated also offers software to monitor your security and your employees’ activities on an ongoing basis. In short, our professionals promise to keep you covered, which means your company, employees, customers, and, yes, payday stay secure.
