You are a business leader and a tech savvy company so whats your worst nightmare ? Is it webserver or email outage or software glitches, data theft, mass attrition, virus attack, connectivity breakdown, laptop crash etc or a security incident like a defacement or iframe attack ?
Whatever may have been the answer I believe that being hacked will be the one nightmare you did not have because it is the mother-of-all-nightmares. The reason is simple - someone you do not know, comes out of nowhere, screws you by copying all the data that you have (including your personal collection of dirty pics) , and this guy does not even have a proper name !
d3hydr8 is not even a proper nickname - if your parents had named you d3hydr8 you can imagine the horrible time you would have had when growing up
OK so just when you were cruising along the business superhighway, having a good time, this cracker, this nameless guy, this low member of the human species messes your chaste self and goes and tells the world.
Imagine the gall of this guy who has committed a crime by haping you and then going and telling the world how much fun he/she had making it through the holes in your environment. And just when you were going to keep quiet about it because who (in his / her right mind) will go about telling people "I got 'r...d' or 'ha...d' "
Now that you have lost your jewels and are no longer chaste you have to face the humiliation of being branded promiscuous. What !!! Oh yea, my dear Mr CEO welcome to the real world. You remember all those nice moral policemen who say that if you wear tight clothes (or revealing ones) you are inviting assault. So now that you are a "hapee", you have to prove to the world that you had proper stuff in place to defend yourself and you may have to pay the people who had entrusted their data with you.
Your reputation mirror now is cracked and blackened as you are no longer chaste, the word is out on the internet and it is impossible to erase anything, you will have a nice amount of legal expenses coming up, you have to find scapegoats (your mistress, gf, enemy, Pakistan, LeT... someone, anyone who talks or writes about your hape).
While you should be happy you have made it to the history books, this is one book you did not want to be mentioned in !
Yes this is the worst nightmare you were scared to dream and kept living in a fools paradise telling yourself "it can't happen to me", "we are too small to be attractive", "what will the haper find to be of value". Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and maybe it is the guy next door seeing you everyday who finds you attractive enough to hape .
So your worst dream (the nightmare you were too scared to have) comes true and you must first go to the only private place in the world (a.k.a. loo) and cry. Yes shed as many tears as you can because in the next few days and weeks your life will not belong to you and you will be so lonely you may go nuts.
Many discoveries will be made - the world is against you; every bit of news on the net is about you; people do not have any work to do and are just spending their time gossiping about your hape (it hurts bad, and the hurt will stay forever); for every site you curse, there are 100 tweets and new sites that come up ! Oh God, if only I could just blast everyone. Life was so cool I had everything under control (PCI, IT, ST, CC, ISMS whatever alphabet) and now life has, all of a sudden, become a bitch.
All I can say - take it easy. Don't start raving and ranting at everyone who talks about you. It is not possible to stop websites quoting other websites and you cannot send emails to every registrar in the world complaining like "Uncle, uncle - he is repeating what that world is saying about me. Please take him down because he is not repeating my words, only theirs ! "
The internet is the big humbler in today's age. Hundreds and thousand unknowns will join up in a just cause so if you are haped don't show your muscle online, try truth and humility and you will win friends and helpers by the thousands
Then All the kings friends will help put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Unfortunately I have just seen evidence of some post-haping vindictive action and am shocked at their lack of knowledge (and acceptance) of the online world (inspite of being a 'leader' in this domain). The 'complaint' is funny and shows a badly hurt ego looking for a scapegoat. A dignified response may have earned them many supporters and sympathizers but that is least expected when you consider that the corporate statement about the hape was totally in denial.
So now, as I write this there are 1000's of tweets and sites that are carrying this information so are they going to take down each and every one of them ! Fundamental Incident Management is missing too.
Labels: hack, hape