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Post Mortem of GunnAllen IT Meltdown
CowboyRobot writes "The story begins when GunnAllen, a financial company, outsourced all of its IT to The Revere Group. Before long, it was discovered that 'A senior network engineer had disabled the company's WatchGuard firewalls and routed all of the broker-dealer's IP traffic--including trades and VoIP calls--through his home cable modem.' In addition to the obvious security concerns of sending information such as bank routing information and driver's license numbers, the act violated SEC rules because the routed information was not being logged. Regardless of whether the cause was negligence, incompetence, or sabotage, the matter was swept under the rug for a time until unpaid SQL Server licenses meant threatening calls from Microsoft as well. The rest of the story is one of greed, mismanagement, and neglect, and ends with the SEC's first-ever fine for failure to protect customer data."
'A senior network engineer had disabled the company's WatchGuard firewalls and routed all of the broker-dealer's IP traffic--including trades and VoIP calls--through his home cable modem.
That's got to be the funniest thing I've ever read on /. Seriously, it sounds like something from an Onion story.
Agreed. I work in the MSP (Managed Service Provider) sector which is a fancy way of saying that we are outsourced IT. We focus on the SMB market where a company is too small to have a dedicated IT department, but just large enough that they place a trouble ticket in our queue once a week. Sometimes once a day. Anything ranging from tier 1 to 3 support.
However, once you as a company get involved with needing to be HIPPA, PCI, or SOX compliant, that should be synonyms with "dedicated in-house IT dept".
Life is not for the lazy.
For the same reason they don't oursource their upper management. After all, CEOs cost money, why not outsource CEO to a management company and cut costs. After all, they are a finance company, not a management company, so all their management should be outsourced.
Learn to love Alaska
They are a finance company. Not an IT one
If you run any business beyond the level of a mom-and-pop restaurant, you are in the IT business whether you want to be or not. The only question is whether you will leverage IT as a strategic asset or be outcompeted by those who do.
Consultants are often used for outsourcing blame, rather than outsourcing capability. "Oh, our consultant recommended that."
Learn to love Alaska
Eventually the people in charge are going to realize that any kind of financial institution is basically a database on the internet that holds and exchanges account information. And then they're going to turn ghostly white as they realize all these strangers are touching the equipment that, in a very real sense, IS the bank, er, financial whatever...or worse, those strangers OWN the equipment that IS the financial gobstopper.
And then, at least in finance, outsourcing IT will be seen as a form of insanity.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
A financial company outsourcing its IT ought to be considered criminal negligence.
Outsourcing IT isn't the problem. A failure to oversee the IT services provided was the problem; A complete lack of auditing and process control. I wish people would stop looking at outsourcing as somehow evil; It makes sense in a lot of cases. Most corporations have other companies contracted to replace and maintain printers. Most office printers have the ability to retain all documents printed from it, locally, to a harddrive inside it. That isn't a problem by itself -- unless you don't know that the functionality is enabled, and don't audit or remove the drives before the printers are rolled out the front door with all your confidential data... that you thought was secure because you had a contract to shred all your documents.
The story of GunnAllen's criminal negligence starts with the CTO and board of directors -- who fired people for coming forward with security problems, and had a very obvious closed-door policy. Nobody with the parent company wanted to hear about problems, and it's no surprise that the firm they contracted with heard that loud and clear -- and propagated the same attitude right on down the line. "See no evil, hear no evil" often leads to a lot of people doing evil.
GunnAllen's story is one being repeated by the thousand every morning of every workday across our industry. Managerial incompetence leads to otherwise trivial problems becoming fines, bankrupcy, and lawsuits. This story is not about the failures of IT -- IT was involved, but it was not that failed. It was the people at the top... and when the extent of the damage was finally discovered by the government, they tried to pin it all on former employees and the people under them. I'd like to know where those managers are now; Because I know they'll eventually find themselves in another position of power at another company. Whereas all the engineers and people who actually worked for a living, well... we all know what happened to them, whether the article says so or not.
You want to fix problems like this: Start with accountability.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I have news for you. People have the most ingenious ways of paying back arseholes. Thus, you don't always get great service by demanding more for less.
As a matter of fact, you may [meaning almost certainly WILL] get pretty bad service when you treat people badly - by continually demanding more for less, past the point of reasonableness and fairness.
Unions can be a big help in stopping BS like this from happening.
When you have people purposefully break things just to look good for the bosses that's bad even worse is sweeping security and other issues under the rug.
However no jail time. Refusing to disclose a password in case it's used by such an incompetent carries jail time, but being deliberately criminally incompetent does not. It's a pretty nasty lesson we are teaching the next generation.