Category Archives: Crisis Management

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Lessons From Ebola: Boosting National Preparedness for Pandemics

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NEW ORLEANS—At the first day of the International Disaster Conference and Expo (IDCE), one of the primary topics of areas of concern for attendees and speakers alike was the risk of pandemics and infectious diseases. In a plenary session titled “Contagious Epidemic Responses: Lessons Learned,” Dr. Clinton Lacy, director of the Institute for Emergency Preparedness and Homeland Security at Rutgers, focused on the recent and ongoing Ebola outbreak.

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While only four people in the United States were diagnosed with Ebola, three of whom survived what was previously considered a death sentence, government and health officials cannot afford to ignore the crisis, Lacy warned.

“This outbreak is not just a cautionary tale, it is a warning,” Lacy said.

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“Ebola is our public health wakeup call.

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A slow start by the Centers for Disease Control, inadequate protective gear in healthcare facilities, and inadequate planning for screening quarantine and waste management were some of the key failings in national preparedness for Ebola. And all were clearly preventable. A significant amount has been done to improve preparedness, Lacy said, but there is still a significant amount yet to do as well.

Among the issues to be addressed, Lacy pointed to:

Lacy Pandemic Preparedness

Some of that improvement must come from the top. Funding has been cut for healthcare facilities nationwide, as has money for the Hospital Preparedness Program, operated by the CDC. Other solutions can be carried out at both a national level and among individual healthcare facilities, including:

Lacy Solutions

Ultimately, Lacy said, the concern is not about Ebola—it’s about the new and emerging diseases that could prove even more catastrophic. Dozens of diseases have been discovered emerging in nature, and we have no previous contact with them, meaning we have no immunity. Further, the risks of reemerging illnesses and synthetic bio threats that any graduate student or doctor of biology could make in a lab pose a significant danger that must be prepared for now.

“Public health infrastructure is like fire departments—you can’t just fund them when there are fires,” Lacy said.

The bebe Hack: Guarding Against Cyberbreach During the Holiday Shopping Season

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bebe data breach

On Friday, retail chain bebe announced that it had identified an attack on computers that operate the in-store payment processing system. The attack may have exposed data from cards swiped in retail locations in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands between Nov. 8 and Nov. 26, including cardholder name, account number, expiration date and verification code. The breach did not impact customers who shopped online or in other international locations, bebe reported, and the company has hired a security firm to stop and investigate the attack.

Almost exactly a year after the massive Target hack, this latest incident comes after a steady stream of sizable breaches among retailers, including Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase and eBay. Consumers have begun to find these hacks increasingly less surprising, and stopped paying as much attention – a phenomenon many are calling “breach fatigue.”

But companies are not entirely off the hook. While Target is on the rebound and subsequent breach victims have endured less damage to consumer perception, these cybersecurity incidents still demand a notable amount of contingency planning and mitigation.

According to public relations and social media firm Affect, there are four keys to protecting brand reputation in the event of a security breach:

1) Develop a Fully Locked and Loaded Response Plan

In the digital age, it is essential to have a cyber attack plan in place as part of an organization’s crisis management strategy. Companies can get ahead of a crisis by leveraging social media to diffuse damaging situations. In order to prepare, be sure to anticipate and understand the kinds of threats that could influence your business and your industry.

“There are four phases of crisis communications: readiness, response, reassurance and recovery,” said Sandra Fathi, president of Affect. “In order to properly respond to a crisis, each stage must be ready to go at a moment’s notice — develop materials such as messages and prepared statements, prepare delivery channels like hotlines and social media platforms and train employees regarding awareness and organizational procedures.
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2) The Customer is Top Priority

Arguably the most important step in maintaining a brand’s image amid a breach is to be honest with customers and inform them about what has occurred — the sooner the better, especially if their personal information is at stake. In fact, 47 states have Security Breach Notification Laws that govern communication with customers in the face of a security breach including the timeline for those communications. Several weeks elapsed before Target released an official statement to their customers and as a result, experienced massive backlash from customers, other organizations and the media alike.

Adam Levin, chairman and founder of IDT911, a provider of data risk and identity management services, believes every company needs to demonstrate three things in the wake of a data breach.

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“Urgency, transparency, and empathy are all critical. I don’t think they [Target] showed enough of those three,” Levin said in an interview with ABCNews.com. Not being upfront with customers can result in a loss of confidence in the brand that can hinder not only the company’s reputation, but could lead to a loss in revenue.

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3) Monitor the Situation in Real-Time

Social media can be a powerful tool but “with great power comes great responsibility.” While positive engagements boost a brand’s respect, companies must always monitor for negative interactions in real-time and be even more stringent during a security breach, as customers will turn to social media to respond to situations, regardless of their allegiance to the brand. Develop a Social Media Response Map that outlines anticipated situations and correlated standard responses to avoid any last minute shuffle. Don’t shy away from angry customers that continuously post adverse comments.

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Depending on the situation, it may be worthwhile to engage with these individuals in a private forum and resolve their concerns, taking the negative sentiments offline.

4) Don’t Repeat the Same Mistakes

For brands, it is especially important to not make the same mistakes twice. Customers may or may not forgive a first offense, so a second go-around is even harder to rebound from. Companies must carefully document and analyze each breach to identify how it happened, why it happened and how to prevent such an event in the future. Consider changing security vendors, deploying new software, re-training staff and amending company policies. It is also important to communicate these changes to customer to reassure them that a similar breach will not reoccur.

Lessons from MBIA: When Breaches Go Viral

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data breach

We can add another breached company to the ever-growing list: the Municipal Bond Insurance Association (MBIA). While not necessarily unique from other breaches we’ve seen lately, the MBIA incident brought another aspect of breach fallout into the public eye, and that’s the potential for data exposures to go viral. These viral breaches generate tendrils of compromised information that reach far and wide, creating a nightmare for containment—and public relations.

Known as the largest bond insurer in the country, MBIA services accounts for many government investment pools. In late September, the company was alerted by an ethical hacker that hundreds of pages of customer data were showing up online for all to see. We’ve since learned that one of the company’s database servers had been improperly configured, resulting in the exposure of highly sensitive data. Account numbers were compromised along with customers’ names, account balances and other confidential information. But the damage didn’t stop there. Not only was MBIA’s customer data floating around the Internet for all to see, it also had been indexed by several search engines. Information that should have been heavily protected was now on the Web in multiple locations, far outside the control of MBIA.

The release of customer data wasn’t the only problem. High-level security keys were also exposed and indexed, including administrative credentials and instructions for creating new deposit accounts. Not only were cybercriminals given a nearly perfect tutorial to dig into additional data held by MBIA that hadn’t been compromised in the first go-round, the instructions also provided a way for thieves to quietly pull funds out of the compromised accounts. The integrity of MBIA’s systems had been damaged far beyond a simple data breach.

Piling on to the organization’s woes were two failures of their own making. One is that their Oracle server is commonly known to need careful configuration to avoid a potential security gap.

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Oracle has even provided documentation to help administrators configure it correctly and ensure the servers are secure. The other was that MBIA was actually notified of the exposure more than a week before the company finally cut off access to the compromised server.

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Not only was the company behind the curve in configuring its critical infrastructure correctly, it then delayed in fixing a problem that was brought to its attention.

In many respects, MBIA’s breach wasn’t all that different from other breaches. Network vulnerabilities are common avenues for hackers, and security warnings have been known to be overlooked. Target’s massive 2013 breach and similar recent exposures back this up.

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Unfortunately for MBIA, these factors all came together in a perfect storm that resulted in a truly viral breach. Sensitive customer data was compromised and unspeakably valuable credentials and account creation instructions were also exposed. The indexing of that information on more than one major search engine spread the leaked data far and wide. Containment and mitigation became exponentially more difficult.

There is some reasonably good news in all of this. At this time, it doesn’t appear any of MBIA’s clients were defrauded as a result of the breach—yet. There are also important lessons we can learn from MBIA’s mistakes. Network assets must be carefully administered, as their security is one of the first lines of defense against criminals. In addition, security warnings—whether they’re provided by ethical hackers, concerned customers or automated intrusion detection systems—must be immediately checked out.

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Dealing with Reputation Risk

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reputation risk and social media

Properly assessing risk is critical to any business. Successful businesspeople understand that every decision they make must be weighed against the potential risk to the company. This risk assessment must not be limited solely to situations directly related to the business itself, however.

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They must also consider reputation risk, or the risk events will have a negative impact on one’s personal reputation and, by extension, the business.

Whether fair or not, the decisions made in someone’s personal life can have a substantial impact on the company they are connected to. This risk extends beyond just the owner or executives of a company; employees caught doing unscrupulous things can cause a public relations nightmare for the business, ultimately resulting in massive losses for the company itself.

Assessing Reputation Risk

Unlike business transactions, where there are countless models and historical examples of the likely risk and reward of most given situations, reputation risk is far harder to quantify and prepare for. It is nearly impossible to predict, for example, whether or not an executive will get belligerently intoxicated and assault a police officer. The executive can bring unwelcome attention to the company, which in turn can cause investors, advertisers, and partners to shy away in the short or even long-term.

Exacerbated in the Social Media Generation

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have dramatically intensified reputation risks. In the past, it was possible for a relatively minor incident to be swept under the rug or forgotten relatively quickly. If not, chances were good that a story would stay relatively local, perhaps reported in an area newspaper once or twice before fading from memory.

Today, however, even a single story in a local newspaper (or, worse, an online blog) can be shared and re-shared thousands of times in a matter of hours.

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“Viral” stories can spread across an industry and the country within only a day or two. By the same token, an ill-advised Facebook or Twitter post on a controversial topic can be shared just as quickly.

Mitigating the Danger

Unfortunately, there is only so much one can do when trying to guard against reputational risk problems. It is impossible to control every human being’s actions, and even harder to control them every second of every day. The only viable solution is offering guidelines to employees and executives to try and minimize the problem as much as possible. It is also worth calculating risk factors among employees. For example, an employee with a history of public intoxication or domestic abuse issues may not be someone you want representing your company.

At the end of the day, there is only so much one can do to reduce reputation risk. It is important, however, to have a public relations strategy on hand for if and when a troublesome situation arises—and it almost certainly will at some point.

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