Digital is the Glue for Business – Cyber Security can make this unstuck

Every business is addressing Digital as the approach to drive a better customer experience and to reduce costs through the introduction of self-serve channels.


In the Digital world, everything is open 24 hours per day and that is the basic expectation. Recently SKYPE had an unexpected outage and all customers received an apology with an offer for a week’s free calls.

We expect systems to work 24x7 and that there be no downtime. I’ve seen myself access closed on weekends for basic maintenance and have to do a double take. Oh yeah that’s correct.

Digital is clearly the Glue for Business, even in Australian Government we are seeing the focus on ‘e’ across all portfolios and there are a series of Digital Disruption Government Conferences that have emerged.

Moving into the Digital era, means often that you require capabilities that are not in-house and therefore have to be acquired. This starts to open the Enterprise Fortress and while, openness is not a bad thing this has significant implications for security.

These partners also become the targets for cyber security hackers, which is sobering and we all have existing vendors that may or may not meet the security requirements that we enforce in the Enterprise. If they don’t then it is clear then that you are accepting that risk whether you realise it or not.

 

Accenture have noted in a recent Strategy document that: “Downtime is not just costly but untenable. Failures and hostile cyber actions have profound impacts on enterprise performance—even enterprise viability”.


CXO Oversight


In every organisation there are usually two CXO parties that are responsible for Cyber Security. This might be the CISO and CIO \ CMO\ CRO or in many organisations this also includes the CEO.

Cyber Security is all about protecting one’s reputation and in a Digital world this is not a domain that can be delegated. It is becoming too important and every breach that has occurred and is going to occur is going to reinforce this position.

The CEO has to take this onto his personal agenda, if he or she doesn’t then it will result in scenarios like we saw in Target USA and many other organisations.

It is reality that cyber security is no longer a backoffice concern and the expectation of Digital Resilence. Our thought leaders at McKinsey have noted that this shift from cyber security as a control function is in the past.

There is a greater integration of Digital IT with Business Processes (the Glue), and with these raised stakes Cyber Security becomes critical.


Extending the Perimeter

This means that our staff, their families and partners that we work with all become part of the security ecosystem. With this scope it is not really possible to simply extend the security perimeter but we have to find mechanisms to educate and provide safeguards for these players.

It won’t be acceptable for staff or partners not to take cyber security policies as serious and it becomes a dismissible offence.

The CEO will also have to provide the input around risk – resource tradeoffs. To actually assume more risk has a real cost and that’s not just Cyber Security Insurance Premiums but largely reputational risk.

For any Digital business ‘trust’ is a critical element of the transaction. It is assumed that you can trust this organisation with your sensitive and valuable data. Any breach of that trust has a cost that is impossible to fully recover from. Just ask any of the Executive teams from organisations that have had major cyber security incidences.


A growing challenge for CMO

Enterprises will progressively embrace greater sources of data and even in the absence of Big Data, this will be sources of data from objects, such as sensors, drones and devices.

Some cool data, but of this information will be sensitive and private. It will require the CXO – perhaps the CMO to be working with the CISO on understanding cyber security which becomes part of the brand.

​What would you do if you received this message?

This was shared with me, earlier this week. It is a fascinating read……

Let me stop here and let you enjoy this.

So what do you do?

You already have been bombarded with 4 million packets per second and you know that it is only time until your system vulnerabilities will start to be exposed. Actually you don’t really know what will happen, as this is the first time you have witnessed this event happening before your eyes.
Once you have got over the poor English language that has been used in the message, it dawns on you that ‘Houston we have a problem’
So what are your options:

• Call your Telecom provider and ask for their assistance?
• Get out that business card and buy a DDOS service?
• Go online and buy 100 bitcoins?
• Pray like hell or go straight to the pub?

Option 1 your Telco Provider

 

This is when you try to call in the favour and get your partner to help.
Of course this all depends on your business scale etc and how long you have been working together. However it is unlikely that they would support you, as the attack will start to effect their own service.

Option 2 Buy DDOS

 

There is no time to negotiate the rate, so it will be at the top of the range of the price book. It is likely that you will need to escalate the approval as it is outside of normal delegated authority.
You will expect that while this measure will work, that there will be questions asked from Risk Committees, Procurement and others about why this transpired. While you may get the organisation out of trouble, you may have landed in it along the way.

Option 3 Buy Bitcoins

There is never a fast way to acquire Bitcoins, unless you have already traded in the past and have already completed the normal KYC process.
If you do have Bitcoins, then you will also be suspicious that this is not going to be the end of the demands.

 

Arrhg……


Option 4 - Pray like hell or Go to the Pub

Sorry, this will only serve to soothe you and numb your feelings. But actually not have any added benefit to the situation.
It may be cheaper than 100 bitcoins, but your career may be over and there’s not much that you can do.


The Real Case Study 

In this real life example, that occurred option 2 was chosen by the client.
They actually had a DDOS service that was in-place and they had tested this on a periodic basis. The SLA was 15 minutes and this was nearly met, however there was human judgment involved and that delayed this by a few additional minutes.

As the business was an online mobile based company, any outage would have dire consequences and the hackers chose the perfect time to strike – which happened to be at an expected peak time.

Once the network traffic was diverted via the DDOS provider, the danger was averted and in effect the attack was abandoned………Life reverted to normal.

Read more ​10 Cyber Security Startups to note

Some Learnings

At the time of the crisis – a 3^rd party organization was engaged to provide the Network and Cyber Security monitoring and they took the necessary and express actions to address the issue. They told me this story and to protect the innocent they have declined to be named or to share their client’s name.

This is even when things actually worked out well.

The other learning was that it was expected that this organization could withstand up to 500MB before the firewalls would start to drop packets and become useless.
However the learning was that the packets that were sent to flood the firewall were designed to maximize damage and the issue kicked in much earlier than expected at 300MB of bandwidth.

It is not impossible but actually very hard to practice such a scenario.