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SMB isn’t ready for disaster. Are you?

Mike Rothman January 18, 2011 No Comments

You all know how much I like surveys. But I tend to think surveys targeted at SMB tend to be a little closer to reality, especially ones with 1,000+ responses. Our Big Yellow pals recently did a Disaster Preparedness Survey of 1,800+ small businesses, and the news isn’t very good, but not unexpected either. Here are a few soundbites: Median cost of a day of downtime is $12,500. 50% of respondents don’t have a DR plan. 41% said it never occurred to them to put a plan in place. 40% said it’s not a priority. Less than half back up data weekly. Only 23% back up data daily. 50% of those with DR plans wrote one after an outage Yes, I could go on and on – but why bother? The issues are the same and a consistent mentality applies whether you are talking about security or disaster recovery. That’s the other guy’s problem. It won’t happen to me. Until it does. We could be talking about an attack that takes out our critical resources or a hardware failure that takes out our critical resources. They’re effectively the same. You end up with stuff that’s down and unavailability is bad. That’s if you like your job. So what to do? Continue fighting the good fight. Push for an incident response plan, as well as a disaster recovery plan. There should be a lot of leverage between the two. At least from the standpoint of restoring operations. The Symantec folks made a few recommendations, which are actually pretty good. They include: Don’t wait until it’s too late, protect information completely, get employees involved, test frequently, and review your plan. Yup, that’s pretty much what you want to do. Don’t wait until it’s too late to make sure you are ready for problems. Regardless of whether you work for a big or small company. Share:

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Incite 1/19/2011: Posturing Alpha Males

Mike Rothman January 18, 2011 No Comments

One of the terms you’ll likely hear at RSA this year is security posture. Along with “situational awareness” and other terms which refer to your ability to understand if you are under attack and how your defenses are positioned to protect your assets. But I’m fascinated by the psychology of posturing, because we see that kind of behavior every single day. It’s not like I go clubbing a lot (as in, at all), but you can always tell when someone who thinks they are an alpha male enters. They intentionally project a “don’t fsck with me” attitude and are likely to fly into a ‘roid rage at any time. They are posturing, and it’s likely a self-esteem issue has caused them to overcompensate by juicing up and thinking that pushing around someone around in a bar makes them cool. Either that or they have a small piece. Maybe their Mom could have given them a few more hugs growing up. Or they should have tried that Swedish pump highlighted in Austin Powers. I know we aren’t done with the 2010 season yet (though my teams have been eliminated, so I’m just a bemused observer at this point), but there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the 2011 season. The CBA (collective bargaining agreement) expires in early March and the owners don’t think the existing structure is good for them. Of course, at the other end of the table, the players want their fair share of the unbelievable revenues generated by the NFL. Fair is the key word here. Each has their own definition of fair. So there is a lot of posturing on both ends. Everyone wants to be the alpha male. Each says the other side wants a lockout. Lots of disinformation is flying back and forth, all to sway the fans to support one side or the other. The spin doctors are working overtime. Sounds like a presidential election, come to think of it. Personally, it’s hard to feel bad for either side. The owners are billionaires and the NFL is a cash machine. The players are very well compensated for playing a game. And millions of fans dutifully buy season tickets, watch games, and buy merchandise. In fact, my Matt Ryan jersey arrived yesterday. Just in time! Frackin’ snow storm. So I’ll be pissed if there is any kind of lockout. All of these 7 and 8 figure alpha males just need to get over themselves and remember it’s because of us fans that they get to do anything. These guys forget we have alternatives. I can tell you college football will become a lot more popular if there is some kind of NFL work stoppage. SEC football is pretty OK, even if you don’t have an alma mater to go bonkers over. The NCAA should move games to Sunday if the NFL doesn’t play. Seems the owners believe that if they delay or cancel the season, all the fans will let wait breathlessly for their return. I know this is a game of high stakes poker, but it seems there is a lot of short-term thinking here. With billions of dollars being generated, it’s unbelievable that you can’t structure a win-win situation for all involved. Gosh, am I thinking rationally here? Must be time to take the clear, or is today a cream day? A good ‘roid rage will do wonders for my outlook on the situation. And anyway, I need my full alpha male posture on come RSA time… -Mike Photo credits: “Bad Posture” originally uploaded by bartmaguire Vote for Me. I’ll buy you a beer. There is still time to vote for the Social Security Blogger Awards. The Incite has been nominated in the Most Entertaining Security Blog Category. My fellow nominees are Jack Daniel’s Uncommon Sense, the Naked Sophos folks, and some Symantec bunker dwellers from the UK. All very entertaining and worthy competition. Help out a brother with a vote. Incite 4 U The Lazy Man’s Guide to Success: Mike Dahn has a treatise called Leverage, where he calls for a number of tactics to increase your effectiveness in the next year. Things like delegation, networking, and turning cost centers into revenue opportunities. Interesting stuff. What do all of these ideas have in common? They allow you to be lazy. If you can get someone else to do your work for you, why wouldn’t you? I’d love to delegate all the stuff I’m supposed to do. I’d like to turn my cost centers into revenue centers. I like the idea of leverage. Because I’d much rather be reading NFL news all day than actually doing work. Who wouldn’t? But I shouldn’t joke too much because Mike has a point here. Unless your goals are too low, you will need help to get there. So think about it from that perspective. – MR Someone needs a fact checker: I understand that press releases are a fact of life. While they all sound exactly the same, some of them provide a valuable nugget of information mixed in with all the masturbatory self-congratulations for signing up yet another small school district as a customer. After the obligatory FUD, that is. For example, today I received, “In the wake of increasing levels of data breaches, accidental data losses and incidents of user’s privacy being compromised, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) is set to release its 2011 Data Breach Incident Readiness Guide in time for Data Privacy Day (Jan. 28th)”. Which is funny, as most sources like the Open Security Foundation DataLossDB and our own 2010 Data Security Survey show a relative decline in reported breaches. Maybe there are more breaches and privacy leaks, but it isn’t like they have numbers to prove it. – RM The Recognized Leader: I am the leader in a new ‘market’. I just found this out after having read the press release on Nice Systems’ new product to reduce financial risk associated with PCI-DSS. Apparently they provide live redaction of call

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