DigiNotar declared bankruptcy this week, following a high profile attack that lead to malicious certifications being issued. Some five hundred certifications were issued, for everything from Google, to Twitter, to Microsoft, to the entire *.com and *.org namespace. Major browsers quickly removed DigiNotar’s root from the chain, thus protecting folks from these rouge certifications. And then DigiNotar was no more.
People are already saying this proves that IT security breaches put companies out of business.
I believe that is the wrong lesson.
Let’s take four companies with high profile breaches: DigiNotar, Distribute.IT, Sony, and TJXX. DigiNotar went bankrupt. Distribute.IT? Shuttered. Sony is back to business (handling it with an update to their SLA.) TJX is unaffected.
So why did TJX survive? At first, this does not make much sense. But consider the attack as it relates to impact to the organization’s mission.
TJX is in retail and has reasonably deep pockets. The attack did not so much as ruffle its ability to sell product. Save for a dip during the fall out from the attack, TJX did not suffer economic harm.
Sony is in the business of providing access to its services. Though the attack was not necessarily about availability, the attack severely affected Sony’s ability to reach the customer. They have deep pockets, however, and are making their way back. The reasoning behind the service level agreement and terms and conditions agreements is to minimize the cost exposure of future breaches.
Distribute.IT was in the hosting business. Their job was to keep other companies sites online, available, and protected. The attack was an availability attack that was made worse due to mismanagement of data backups. Distribute.IT, without the cash reserves and without any means to get back to business, was dead in the water.
The attack on DigiNotar struck right at the heart of their business. The mission of a certificate authority is to safeguard certificates and ensure issuance only to legitimate entities. We are talking about reliability and authenticity attacks against a company that markets a reliable and authentic security service. Further, due to DigiNotar’s limited reach (fewer than 2% of SSL hosts), there was little risk for the browser makers to remove DigiNotar’s root.
The lesson here is security controls must be framed within the context of the organization’s mission. Breaches can be weathered if the impact is low or in an area outside the core mission. Security breaches only put companies out of business when controls are not appropriately geared to the organization and when the financial impact is serious.
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