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Casualties Mount as Calif. Fire Continues to Burn

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The massive Thomas Fire in Ventura County has claimed another victim. CalFire Engineer Cory Iverson was killed while battling the blaze, which has so far burned 252,500 acres and destroyed about 1,000 homes and businesses, according to the federal InciWeb fire information website. One other death connected to the fire was a woman killed in a car crash while evacuating.

Iverson had been with the agency since 2009 and was assigned to the Thomas Fire as part of a fire-engine strike team from CalFire’s San Diego unit.

“I know I speak for us all in saying our hearts go out to our CalFire colleagues during this difficult time.

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This is a tragic reminder of the dangerous work that our firefighters do every day,” Teresa Benson forest supervisor, Los Padres National Forest said in a statement. “The Thomas Fire has many unprecedented conditions and complexities that challenge the already demanding job of fire suppression.”

The Thomas fire broke out Dec. 4 in Ojai, northwest of Los Angeles. Strong Santa Ana winds helped it to quickly spread to the city of Ventura, according to InciWeb.

Up to 85,000 people were impacted by power outages and surges in the Santa Barbara area, according to the Southern California Edison utility company. Santa Ana winds are expected to continue on Friday and through the weekend, and could reach up to 30 miles per hour in some areas. Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, has ordered mandatory evacuation of a portion of the county.

The Thomas fire has also taken a toll on agriculture, which is a billion industry in California employing more than 400,000 people in the state.

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The wildfire struck the largest avocado- and lemon-producing region in the United States. A 200-acre farm lost 80% of its avocado crop, according to the New York Times. Avocado orchards are more vulnerable because of their location near hillsides in the path of the fire.

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Consumers are unlikely to see a surge in the price of avocados from the fire because most avocados bought in the United States are grown in Mexico. A spike in lemon prices is unlikely to occur even though Ventura County produces more than 40% of the national output, because any lost crop can be made up by increasing imports, John Krist, chief executive of the Ventura County Farm Bureau told the Times.

More About Santa-Related Risks

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Earlier this month, we reviewed how the mere mention of Santa Claus can affect business and finance. Tying his name to a stock market rally or business operation could make values jolly, or the reverse, it could have more of a Freddy Krueger effect. But even if your portfolio and productivity remain unchanged, Santa-related risks can also follow you home and even impact family life.

Anyone who needs more than a mere glimpse of Santa Claus may want to take the fun a step further and attend one of the SantaCons across the country (many of which will be held this weekend). According to SantaCon.info, the best-known repository for SantaCons, at least 397 cities in 52 countries host the events, and some cities have more than one. Whether you want to appear in costume or take your family, dressed in their red, green and white seasonal sweaters, the site has some tips to help you avoid getting jilted out of holiday cheer. The site warns that while SantaCons are typically free, some are ticketed events to help organizers cover excess costs, and many of the Santa-themed events are commercial. Then there are the spoilers. It continues:

Again, this year, websites are popping-up making false claims and trying to sell SantaCon tickets. Please be careful not to get scammed and also consider the reputation and safety risks involved. Use this guide:

  • Most SantaCons are completely free to attend (Washington, D.C. is one of these).
  • Many SantaCons request a donation which is completely optional (San Francisco is one of these).
  • Some SantaCons request a donation which gets you some benefits (NYC is one of these).

Visit the site to review the overall criteria for entering and remaining at SantaCon for the event’s duration.

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The most important guidelines cover dress, safety, and conduct:

  1. You can dress how you like but the theme is red.
  2. Don’t make kids cry.
  3. Don’t mess with security and make people feel unsafe.
  4. Don’t get drunk or high.

(It would seem like disregarding tips 3 and 4 could directly cause #2.)

Additionally, be sure to determine if your SantaCon will be family-friendly or for adults only. Some of these events are fundraisers for charities, while others are just a prelude to a pub crawl—which does contradict the fact that Santa is generally discouraged from drunk and disorderly behavior (see guideline #4 above). Those pub crawls are often limited to the Santas in the crowd, but why shouldn’t everybody be merry?

And although you and your family will see Santa’s foot soldiers, lots of people will wonder which is the real Santa amid all the white beards and red hats.

What has become a pastime on Christmas Eve is the tracking of Santa’s location and progress.

There are several devices and agencies dedicated to keeping tabs on Santa. One of the most popular trackers is run by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command).

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Its Santa Tracker began in 1955 after a newspaper ad for Sears mistakenly listed a phone number that kids could dial to reach Santa Claus; it was actually a secret line to the red phone at the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD’s predecessor. One of the outcomes of the ad was to expose the risk of typographical errors in print publications.

Using more than one tracker on Christmas Eve, like the Google Santa Tracker, can call into question Santa’s aerodynamic abilities among children whose vocabularies might not include the word “aerodynamic.” Two trackers may simultaneously show Santa along different routes and indicate different amounts of presents delivered. So once a child is actively following Santa activities on more than one tracker, he or she may then ask: “How can he be in China on the Google tracker when NORAD says he’s in Nebraska?”

Most people actively tracking Santa do not want to comment on the technological and supply chain risks involved, accidentally bringing a “bah humbug” to the holiday. Of course, if you are seeking that information, enjoy reading one of his many risk assessments.

Using ERM to Protect Your Business from The Equifax Fallout

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As with many data breaches, the general conclusion of the Equifax attack is that personnel were not aware of the issue beforehand. This conclusion, however, is false.

In early September, I anticipated that a vulnerability in Equifax’s software was known ahead of time, and that this scandal was, therefore, entirely preventable. A month later, the NY Times reported that the Department of Homeland Security sent Equifax an alert about a critical vulnerability in their software. Equifax then sent out an internal email requesting its IT department to fix the software, but “an individual did not ensure communication got to the right person to manually patch the application.”

The Equifax data breach was a failure in risk management. As a credit bureau that deals with the personally identifiable information (PII) of 200 million U.S. customers, Equifax has a legal and moral responsibility to safeguard their customers’ security, and to adopt the proper systems to do so.

For instance, if Equifax had an enterprise risk management (ERM) system in place, the warning from Homeland Security would have been properly recorded and assigned out to the appropriate personnel. This system would have provided transparency over the status of the task in progress, and would have triggered reminders until the vulnerability was patched and verified by the right subject matter expert.

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A Point of No Return

It’s my opinion that this scandal is a point of no return for risk management. While data breaches have abounded in recent years, there has never been one of this magnitude or one that provides every piece of information hackers need to steal our identities. Of course, lawsuits and penalties are piling up around the company’s negligence, but these financial losses are nothing compared to the reputational damages Equifax will suffer—shares fell by 18% following the breach and have yet to fully recover.

What makes this scandal so unique, and therefore a point of no return, is that these reputational damages reach far beyond Equifax. Consumers can’t always choose whether they’re a customer of Equifax, but they can choose whether to do business with the institutions that gave away their information to Equifax in the first place.

I also believe that consumers’ outrage with this scandal will cause them to shift their money, loyalty, and trust to institutions that can demonstrate effective risk management. CEOs and boards of every company will have to prove their organizations have adequate enterprise risk management systems in place. They’ll find that more effective risk management and governance programs are necessary to keep their market shares up and their reputation clean.

Where to Go from Here

While this breach may appear to be an event of the distant past, we are in the eye of the storm. Stolen information can lie dormant for months or years as criminals wait to make their move, and when they do, you’ll have either taken this period of calm as a chance to forget the scandal, finding yourself ill-prepared, or a chance to get to higher ground, finding yourself fully protected.

To protect themselves, businesses must:

  • First, to determine where to focus your security resources, recognize that people, processes, and procedures are now the biggest risks. Businesses need to perform risk assessments across all departments to determine who has access to sensitive information and authentication processes, and what the business impact would be if these employees were to be impersonated.
  • Next, to address these risks, businesses must rewrite their procedures for authenticating the people involved in sensitive requests and actions both verbally and electronically. With so much PII now in the public domain, it is no longer safe to rely on traditional authentication based on these pieces of information.
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    For example, the security question “What was your first car?” is not effective because the answer is now easily accessible.

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    A more effective question would be “Who was your best friend in elementary school?”

  • Finally, it is important to keep your third-party vendors in mind. Vendors often have access to sensitive information and processes, which could have an enormous impact on your company. It is crucial, therefore, to extend your internal authentication procedures out to your third parties so that they are authorizing sensitive requests and actions as securely as your own organization.

Our world, including the business world, is becoming increasingly transparent, meaning it’s up to you to act with integrity and protect your stakeholders. Keeping the Equifax data breach in mind, along with enacting these tactical steps, will help you stay ahead of the competition and out of glaring social media headlines.

Risk and Crisis Management Explored at Cyber Event

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NEW YORK—Cyberattacks and data security need to be high priorities for all businesses, experts stressed at ALM’s cyberSecure 2017 event here, Dec. 4 and 5. In fact, not only is failing to prepare for an attack or breach risky, it’s foolish, Kathleen McGee, internet & technology bureau chief for the Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York said in Monday’s opening address. She added that not reporting a breach in a timely fashion has its own set of legal and reputational risks, referring to the SHIELD Act (the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act), introduced to New York State legislature by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in November.

“Under the SHIELD Act, companies would have a legal responsibility to adopt reasonable, administrative, physical and technical safeguards for sensitive data,” she said Monday, adding that the standards would apply to any business holding data of New Yorkers, whether or not they do business in the state.

McGee noted that even though a company may not have all the details in the first 72 hours following a breach, reporting it to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) or another regulator is crucial. It is a legal requirement as part of the NYDFS Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies, and even if all the pertinent information about an attack is not yet available, divulging what is known will prevent further enforcement action from the state.

“For some companies, data is the only commodity,” she said. “But in the past 10 years, risk assessments have not evolved as quickly as data collection.”

That observation lent itself to a segue for the next session, “Integrating Periodic Risk Assessment to Avoid Becoming the Next Target of a High-Profile Cyberattack.” Panelists covered the importance of formal risk assessments, which will be legally required by regulators like the NYDFS and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and goes into effect in 2018.

Moderator Eric Hodge, director of consulting at CyberScout, said education charts the path to a positive assessment and suggested using non-traditional training methods to onboard clients and employees over the course of a year.

“There are a lot of ways to educate other than the traditional annual training session set in a typical conference room,” Hodge said. “You can try white hat phishing to trap people in a safe way. Share your stories every month and be honest about your own failures. There are ways beyond just checking a box.”

eHarmony Vice President and General Counsel Ronald Sarian said his company has learned from its past incidents to better prepare and to update its ERM framework. The dating and compatibility company’s site was breached in 2012, before he joined the group.

“You need to do a data impact assessment and ask: What are your family jewels?” noted Sarian, who said he aims to implement ISO27001 as the ERM framework to secure eHarmony’s international and cyber presence. “We had so much in place already that I thought we should take a shot at it. It takes at least a year but so far it’s working for us.”

When considering ransomware, experts from healthcare, insurance and electronic payments companies spoke passionately during a dedicated session about how they mitigate risks. Christopher Frenz, director of infrastructure at the Interfaith Medical Center strongly advocated for network segmentation, which he uses at the center, in an effort to keep intrusions contained.

As previously reported, Advisen’s recent Information Security and Cyber Risk Management Survey indicated that, for the first time in the seven years of the survey, there has been a decline in how seriously C-Suite executives view cyberrisk. With that trend in mind, panelist Christopher Pierson, Ph.D., chief security officer & general counsel of ViewPost, a provider of electronic invoice and payment services to businesses, outlined his approach to eliciting a response from board members.

“You can’t tell the board that [paying] is not an option unless it’s illegal,” Pierson said. “Educate the board and explain that it is an option to pay terrorists and criminal syndicates. You’ll see the looks on their faces and then you’ll get them [to want to take action].”

For more information about GDPR, read Risk Management magazine’s coverage.