Paid Paranoia - Hiring Security Experts
Healthy paranoia is common for the best computer security experts. You'd be paranoid too if you saw the number of outside attacks your computers face every day. You'd be helplessly paranoid if you realized your vulnerability to your own employees. One security chief I talked to set up a system to tell if any unauthorized laptops with wireless LAN capacity were ever turned on within 100 yards of their campus. It allowed them to catch a van full of foreign spies outside of their research facility. Industrial spies who made it inside the building as salespeople, clients, visitors or employees had their laptops wiped clean before they left. It was a weekly occurrence. Are you scared yet? Hiring someone who can spell "Network Security" is easy. Getting the right person is hard. You have to start with the right question: What is your exposure? How secure you need to be? My office got hacked. A nasty little Trojan that buried itself in the server had to be killed. That was ...