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| Boring, costly and absolutely vital |
January 6, 2003 |
By Peter Wolchak
If your company's computer security is not rock-solid, please read this column.
A recent Ipsos-Reid survey illustrates the dismal state of information technology security in Canada. First off, almost half of the medium-sized businesses surveyed had been hit by a virus in the past year.A severe virus can chew through corporate data and grind a company to a halt while the infection is cleaned and the damage repaired.
It's easy to assume mischievous programmers are using new tricks to outwit antivirus software, but most corporate infections are caused by older viruses allowed to run riot by employees who never bother to update their software.
That type of inattention to security comes directly from the top. More than 40 per cent of the CEOs surveyed by Ipsos-Reid said defending against attack-external hackers, internal crooks, worms, network sniffing-was only a moderate priority. Another 19 per cent said it was not a priority at all.
Let's highlight that last number. According to the survey, one in five mid-size companies in Canada could hardly care less about safeguarding their own information or the data they hold on customers. Credit card and Social Insurance Numbers: up for grabs. Street and email addresses, phone numbers, credit history: almost free for the asking.
But the survey had one reassuring number: 80 per cent of respondents said their companies have not been hit by an outside hacker. That's great. And then you read that 40 per cent do not possess the intrusion detection systems necessary to detect a hacker. Furthermore, 57 per cent have no plans to initiate ongoing IT security assessments in the next year.
The problem, according to both Ipsos-Reid and IBM Canada, which commissioned the survey, is that CEOs simply do not view security as a core priority. "Business people perceive this as an IT matter and not as a business matter, and (according to our survey) they only spend 12 per cent of their time on IT issues," said Chris Ferneyhough, vice-president of Ipsos-Reid in Toronto. "So for that little block of time it's an important issue, but outside of that block it is not treated as an important issue. "It's interesting that someone gets a credit card number stolen on the Internet and people decide they won't buy anything online. But business people hear story after story about denial of service attacks, viruses and other things and they don't do anything.
"But the risks out there are great, and it's not going to go away."
So why aren't companies paying attention to this?
Ferneyhough shrugged. "It is a little mind-boggling." One reason, although not a good one, is that security is simply boring. It's like life insurance: it's costly and delivers no immediate benefit.
But security is crucial because a strong e-business sector is incredibly important to Canada. E-business represents a potentially lucrative distribution channel and drives lower operating costs. It's good for consumers, who want more selection and better pricing. And e-business performance is one metric of a country's economic health on the worldwide stage.
But a company cannot claim to have a good ecommerce system if security is lax. The selection may be great, the prices low, and the shipping both quick and inexpensive, but if any high-school hacker can jimmy the door and walk out with customer data then the company is a complete e-business failure.
It's interesting to note one security concern did grab the attention of survey respondents: that any breach not be made public, as that would damage a company's reputation. If a company ignores security and is hit by an information-hungry hacker, we hope the whole world finds out about it and that the bad publicity shuts the company's door forever. It had no right to be in operation in the first place.
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