Slashdot Mirror
A Need for Greater Cybersecurity
otterit writes "A story in the Washington Post discusses how chief executives of U.S. corporations and their boards of directors should assume direct responsibility for securing their computer networks from worms, viruses and other attacks, an industry task force working with the federal government said."
Isn't it about time to really assess whether it is absolutely necessary to provide every employee with their own internet access?
Restricting the internet to a single machine (or battery of machines) that only sent and received external email and forwarded it on to the internal network seems like the absolute maximum internet connection necessary for most businesses.
Surely employees don't have to surf the web at work?
I have been pwned because my
I think it's great that attention is being drawn to security. I think that there should be triple damages for a company releasing data defined private or against any agreement you had pre-arranged. Yet how are you going to protect your data when you outsource your transaction to some place that doesn't live by these rules? You can't. Except recognize that certain corporation outsource and use this information for your decision on who to use. Evaluate it and if you feel that this type outsourcing isn't protecting your data and interests than don't use said corporation.
This is gonna land me in deep water but it's definetly a two way affair -
if the CEO's spend the required money hiring people to take on the responsibility of securing a network then why is it the ceo's fault?
If the people being hired are not competant, but played the 'i know what im doing' role then it is still their fault.
The only time I see it as acceptable that the ceo gets the blame is when the ceo him/herself directly contributes to the lack of security or employee laxness.
The article, imho, is hinting that if a company was to go down due to security problems then it's the ceo who gets the blame if, and when, they are led to believe their networks are (or were in this case) secure/d by an (incompetent) tech-support guy.
I say it truthfully AND before I become flamebait: I have the utmost confidence for *most* IT people, it's usually the users who contribute to the problem not IT departments, but I truly do, in this case, feel sorry for the CEO (with their huge paychecks and massive perks) when they get the blame for something that they did honestly have a go at fixing/preventing.
Worms/Virii are designed to be destructive and disruptive and there is little to no way that most users will ever learn that they need to be more cautious about security without having their credit card details exposed by a black-hat or their personal PC brought to a halt by the worlds least advanced virus - becausethe user hadn't patched their virus scanner.
It's a case of once bitten twice afraid - and if it's kept that way by the community, as long as it doesn't affect me, then I'm all for it - I just hate cleaning up after one has hit.
New rule for virii - release a strain to the public and release a quick-repair tool at the same time to slashdot!