Issue 1 2019

CORPORATE VISION / Issue 1 2019 29 experienced. A clever piece of marketing, since clearly it wasn’t their fault, and they presumably would have been able to claim back any losses from BA. Those businesses that are in a position to make a bold ges- ture during a crisis will allay a lot of consumer fears. For the technical teams involved, it’s impor- tant that business leaders support them to go an extra step or two in investigation: not just the cause of this data loss, but the cause of the cause. Transparency and protection As mentioned, most large firms dealing with money already have monitoring tools in place, but for efficiency, these tools may not be turned up full i.e. if we’re looking at the average transaction speed and sampling every five min- utes, we can easily miss things. It’s usually quick and simple to turn these up to a much higher sampling rate to detect unusual activity, though there will be some cost in slowing systems down and perhaps in getting larger storage for the data harvested. Every cyber attack is different but the best advice for any major product or service failure is to be transparent, focus first and fore- most on protecting your customer and be open about that. Any attempt to control the news leak- ing out will go badly. If you’re in any doubt about the security of a service, the most obvious course of action is to shut it down to avoid any more people being affected. Cyber-Attacks: Responding in Crisis