Nathaniel Fick, “Cybersecurity Today Is Treated Like Accounting Before Enron”:
Every business is now a digital business, and nearly every citizen is increasingly reliant on the connected world. We live in an era of mass targeted attacks where nation state-level resources are being directed against companies and private citizens, and until our security culture changes, we can expect to see more massive breaches throughout 2018 and beyond.
Enron of course was once heralded as “America’s Most Innovative Company,” before it went bankrupt due to fraud. This changed business accounting practices, and helped create the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
Years ago I gave a talk about work done by Carey Priebe, John Conroy, David Marchette, and Youngser Park, where they used scan statistics to analyze communications by Enron executives and employees to look for instances of possible collusion.
Nathaniel Fick’s piece in the NYT on the surface has nothing to do with scan statistics, data analysis, and collusion, but it does offer interesting commentary about how businesses and government today are not held to sufficient levels of responsibility for their security breaches. As a society, we seem to be OK with this, which is unfortunate. We’ve not yet experienced our Enron moment.