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 just a hassle. Nothing worthwhile was stolen. No one got access to credit card numbers or anything that could be sold. It was just an annoyance. Even if they wiped the server clean it would only have been a hassle, not a calamity. I have a low exposure. I can be hassled, not destroyed. You have to decide if you have a low exposure like me, or a huge exposure like the research facility I mentioned. They have a $500,000 security staff and a few million dollars of equipment. They need it. Here is how to deal with those two levels of exposure: I have low exposure If no one has a $100,000 reason to get into your network, go out and hire an hourly security expert from your local Cisco supplier. You don't need a full-time guy. Ask for a certified technician. If the salesman says, "Certification isn't necessary, our guys are all trained," then ask for the training certificates. There are a lot of great security experts who learned their craft without attending a single class, but how are you going to know? It is better to pay an extra $100 per hour for a certified guy you are sure of than to just hope your good feeling about a salesman or technician is right. If you need any kind of information on this article related topic click here: Hack Hire