IT Strategy, security, adapt to change: iPremier Harvard Business Review
Brian Siegel
INFO
Case iPremier Company
Attack of the Killer Firewall Script Kiddy Zombies
A different cup of coffee and wake up call
I enjoyed this case due to the difference in the approach it was presented to us. We were given around eighty percent of dialogue, and another twenty percent of the usual elevator speech case like information. The iPremier case starts just like any other case, at 4 am, while you’re NY, about to present your company information to a huge channel, when all of a sudden, your worst nightmares come to life! Killer kiddy zombies tickling the back of your neck, come to find out, they’re not just raising the hair on your neck too, but this is real! An intruder, but this time it’s not like in the Friday the 13th movie days, this is a virtual predator, tapping into the brain of your operation! What do you do? You call in back up!
No, we’re not going to call ghost busters! We’re going to utilize our network, human and IT. Good thing Mr. Bob Turley had some great people around him that are night owls, dedicated, loyal, answer their phones, and react with a good sense of urgency! With that, people can tame the fire when it runs rampant through a firewall! Good communication, good people, and urgency can get you so far. After that you need good security, firewalls, communication, contingency plans, and “Emergency Response Team”, good functionalities, team make up/design, and access! When a website locks up, you don’t want your team to “lock up”. If the emails say “ha”, and all you can say is “hum”, you may want to re think your security and approach.
Now that the ice water, in this case, waking up abruptly to find your site in jeopardy, woke up our executive, lets dive into this case. There were several issues that immediately come to mind when rethinking this case. There was a connection problem to the Qdata. The company that housed their collocation facility were not helpful at all, didn’t allow access, became another obstacle themselves. They were left in the dark as to what was going on, and due to lack of accessibility, they didn’t know how much damage had been done to the site, and how damaging the hackers were to their system. Was customer (private) data stolen? They took a long time to respond and find out what was going on. They reacted fast, but the info they obtained took a lengthy amount of time, on top of the other obstacles. Their immediate reaction was to “shut down”, which came with huge risk. They were discussing if they should disconnect communication, the site, and escalate the situation before they knew fully what was going on. If they “shut down”, valuable info to track the predators may have been lost. It was as if they were more worried about what the public would think rather than taking care of the system. I would say that the “attack of the night zombies” had bad timing on their part, but good for iPremier. Due to the early morning time, the customers (most) wouldn’t be utilizing the online luxury retail store. There was a huge meeting that was to take place the next day, and if a security breach were to be announced, let alone customer data being stolen, then the view of the market of them would be damaging.
IPremier needs to consider changing whom they outsource their technical architecture to. Qdata was a long time partner, but had internal issues, and was behind where they needed to be technically. Those factors mixed with the issues involved with the example of this case (mainly accessibility), an “emergency response team” should be set up for situations such as this. By the time Turley reached Joanne, and she drove to the collocation center, more damage could have been done. Remote and or wireless access to this location should have been implemented. They ended up being okay, the attack just stopped, but for how long? How much damage had really been done, just not seen? Would it happen again? Will they have to freak out again at 4am before stakeholders may hear damaging news in the future?
They need to beef up their security by encrypting better, or improving their firewall. They need good inbound and outbound traffic protection. They could monitor this traffic via an outside source, hire someone to specifically work in security for them, do a “mock attack”, train better for such a situation, and do better due diligence and research via others besides Qdata like places and study other companies. Spy ware, Trojan removal, firefox, recovery, monitoring (key logger), passwords, secure shred, virus protection, spam blockers, privacy, data back up, encryption. These all sound like a lot just to maintain day-to-day functions, but are necessary. It’s almost like a human, we need to eat, sleep, be comfortable, secure, work hard, take our vitamins, get enough of this and that. Like a recipe of sorts, or a plant that needs all the right ingredients to be successful, an IT program for business needs to encapsulate all the necessary tools to run efficiently, and safely, while maintaining the integrity and quality of the system.
It’s important to have good security due to all the private data such as social security numbers, credit info, banking, and other data that is at risk floating around cyberspace. There are sites that can walk you through “how to hack” step-by-step. All I have to do is go to Google, and I am sure I can strike up a friend or 1000’s who blog, have groups, or just like to “stick it to the man” by creatively using their genius for hacking. One does not have to hack to compromise the integrity of a system, take for example the situation in OH where an intern left info in his car, then it got stolen that way. Not the sexiest “hacking” event, but one would have to be intelligent enough to know how to decipher info from the discs. Thievery and stunts take thought, skill, and sometimes luck. We will always have the “good, bad, and ugly” in our world, but we need to be proactive in seeking preventative methods against these vermin activities. Just like any management system, we want the right one. We don’t want to block out things we need to access, but want to filter in and out the traffic to where it doesn’t create a bottleneck, but serves the purpose of protection we need. Standard operation procedures, enhanced team, training, leadership, design, involvement, culture, security policies, tools, data, risk assessment, interaction of employees, firewalls, antivirus, secure servers, their internet banking, security, technical allies, and utilizing resources need to have better synergy!
Resources:
http://www.securitysoftwarezone.com/how-we-know-good-or-bad-firewall-review62-7.html
Google: how to hack: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+hack and http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
http://achinghead.com/archive/24/firewalls-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007706160389
Lexis Nexis
http://ariel1.xu.edu:2052/universe/document?_m=587c64594026bd1659908f2f1d5e8c0c&_docnum=6&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkVb&_md5=20f974292d248fbd3007434205077a91
Copyright 2007 Business Wire, Inc. Business Wire
April 17, 2007 Tuesday 1:01 PM GMT
1. Business Editors; Technology Writers, Barracuda Spam Firewall Moves Beyond Traditional Reputation Analysis With Predictive Sender Profiling; , Behavioral Profiling of Spammers Thwarts Growing Attempts to Obfuscate Spammer Identities, MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
INFO
Case iPremier Company
Attack of the Killer Firewall Script Kiddy Zombies
A different cup of coffee and wake up call
I enjoyed this case due to the difference in the approach it was presented to us. We were given around eighty percent of dialogue, and another twenty percent of the usual elevator speech case like information. The iPremier case starts just like any other case, at 4 am, while you’re NY, about to present your company information to a huge channel, when all of a sudden, your worst nightmares come to life! Killer kiddy zombies tickling the back of your neck, come to find out, they’re not just raising the hair on your neck too, but this is real! An intruder, but this time it’s not like in the Friday the 13th movie days, this is a virtual predator, tapping into the brain of your operation! What do you do? You call in back up!
No, we’re not going to call ghost busters! We’re going to utilize our network, human and IT. Good thing Mr. Bob Turley had some great people around him that are night owls, dedicated, loyal, answer their phones, and react with a good sense of urgency! With that, people can tame the fire when it runs rampant through a firewall! Good communication, good people, and urgency can get you so far. After that you need good security, firewalls, communication, contingency plans, and “Emergency Response Team”, good functionalities, team make up/design, and access! When a website locks up, you don’t want your team to “lock up”. If the emails say “ha”, and all you can say is “hum”, you may want to re think your security and approach.
Now that the ice water, in this case, waking up abruptly to find your site in jeopardy, woke up our executive, lets dive into this case. There were several issues that immediately come to mind when rethinking this case. There was a connection problem to the Qdata. The company that housed their collocation facility were not helpful at all, didn’t allow access, became another obstacle themselves. They were left in the dark as to what was going on, and due to lack of accessibility, they didn’t know how much damage had been done to the site, and how damaging the hackers were to their system. Was customer (private) data stolen? They took a long time to respond and find out what was going on. They reacted fast, but the info they obtained took a lengthy amount of time, on top of the other obstacles. Their immediate reaction was to “shut down”, which came with huge risk. They were discussing if they should disconnect communication, the site, and escalate the situation before they knew fully what was going on. If they “shut down”, valuable info to track the predators may have been lost. It was as if they were more worried about what the public would think rather than taking care of the system. I would say that the “attack of the night zombies” had bad timing on their part, but good for iPremier. Due to the early morning time, the customers (most) wouldn’t be utilizing the online luxury retail store. There was a huge meeting that was to take place the next day, and if a security breach were to be announced, let alone customer data being stolen, then the view of the market of them would be damaging.
IPremier needs to consider changing whom they outsource their technical architecture to. Qdata was a long time partner, but had internal issues, and was behind where they needed to be technically. Those factors mixed with the issues involved with the example of this case (mainly accessibility), an “emergency response team” should be set up for situations such as this. By the time Turley reached Joanne, and she drove to the collocation center, more damage could have been done. Remote and or wireless access to this location should have been implemented. They ended up being okay, the attack just stopped, but for how long? How much damage had really been done, just not seen? Would it happen again? Will they have to freak out again at 4am before stakeholders may hear damaging news in the future?
They need to beef up their security by encrypting better, or improving their firewall. They need good inbound and outbound traffic protection. They could monitor this traffic via an outside source, hire someone to specifically work in security for them, do a “mock attack”, train better for such a situation, and do better due diligence and research via others besides Qdata like places and study other companies. Spy ware, Trojan removal, firefox, recovery, monitoring (key logger), passwords, secure shred, virus protection, spam blockers, privacy, data back up, encryption. These all sound like a lot just to maintain day-to-day functions, but are necessary. It’s almost like a human, we need to eat, sleep, be comfortable, secure, work hard, take our vitamins, get enough of this and that. Like a recipe of sorts, or a plant that needs all the right ingredients to be successful, an IT program for business needs to encapsulate all the necessary tools to run efficiently, and safely, while maintaining the integrity and quality of the system.
It’s important to have good security due to all the private data such as social security numbers, credit info, banking, and other data that is at risk floating around cyberspace. There are sites that can walk you through “how to hack” step-by-step. All I have to do is go to Google, and I am sure I can strike up a friend or 1000’s who blog, have groups, or just like to “stick it to the man” by creatively using their genius for hacking. One does not have to hack to compromise the integrity of a system, take for example the situation in OH where an intern left info in his car, then it got stolen that way. Not the sexiest “hacking” event, but one would have to be intelligent enough to know how to decipher info from the discs. Thievery and stunts take thought, skill, and sometimes luck. We will always have the “good, bad, and ugly” in our world, but we need to be proactive in seeking preventative methods against these vermin activities. Just like any management system, we want the right one. We don’t want to block out things we need to access, but want to filter in and out the traffic to where it doesn’t create a bottleneck, but serves the purpose of protection we need. Standard operation procedures, enhanced team, training, leadership, design, involvement, culture, security policies, tools, data, risk assessment, interaction of employees, firewalls, antivirus, secure servers, their internet banking, security, technical allies, and utilizing resources need to have better synergy!
Resources:
http://www.securitysoftwarezone.com/how-we-know-good-or-bad-firewall-review62-7.html
Google: how to hack: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+to+hack and http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
http://achinghead.com/archive/24/firewalls-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007706160389
Lexis Nexis
http://ariel1.xu.edu:2052/universe/document?_m=587c64594026bd1659908f2f1d5e8c0c&_docnum=6&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkVb&_md5=20f974292d248fbd3007434205077a91
Copyright 2007 Business Wire, Inc. Business Wire
April 17, 2007 Tuesday 1:01 PM GMT
1. Business Editors; Technology Writers, Barracuda Spam Firewall Moves Beyond Traditional Reputation Analysis With Predictive Sender Profiling; , Behavioral Profiling of Spammers Thwarts Growing Attempts to Obfuscate Spammer Identities, MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
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