Sony has been getting repeatedly hacked. We’ve seen it before with the TJX incident, and many others, most of which never get reported, much less disclosed, or even discovered. In some of these cases, only email addresses are taken, or maybe passwords. In others, names and addresses are exposed, as well as medical conditions, social security numbers, and other very sensitive information. It seems to me that this is happening more often, and I think it’s for a few reasons.
Bigger Targets
The first reason is that targets are getting bigger and the rewards go up with size. Nobody is going to waste their time getting into a system with a few thousand random users when you can get tens of millions for the same effort. As more people use more sites, it’s only natural that there are going to be more million-user sites out there. This reason isn’t a big deal, it’s just the way things are.
Better Rewards
The second reason is that more companies are collecting more data about their users. This data is valuable, possibly the most valuable asset some of these companies has. Facebook and Google make much of their money from knowing about you, what you do online, the types of things you’re interested in, different ways to contact you.
Large companies like Sony can afford to take whatever information you give them and cross-reference it against various databases to get even more information about you. This lets them focus marketing efforts, tailor campaigns to you, shape product development and so on. This also lets them make the site more easy to use with pre-filled information, to increase sales and conversions.
We don’t even really question when a site asks us for our name any more. What’s the harm, right? Sure, I’ll give them my ZIP code too, and maybe even my phone number, they probably won’t call me anyways, right? Now ask yourself, why do you need to give your name, mailing address and phone number to a company to play a game where you are a pseudonymous elf?
The real answer is that they don’t. They might need it for billing purposes, but billing databases are kept much more secure for reasons I’ll explain later. They ask for this information because it’s free, and because you’ll give it to them, and because it’s valuable to them. It’s probably not protected very well, and when it gets stolen everyone shrugs, changes the password on the database, emails the FBI to make it look like they care, and gets back to more important business like social media strategies.
No Penalties
The companies involved are embarrassed and probably suffer some losses as a result, but these are mostly minor injuries. The news stories spin it to make the intruders the sole criminals, and lose interest. The only people who really pay for these incidents are the people whose data has been stolen. There are no requirements on what companies have to do to protect this information, no requirements on what they need to do if it is compromised, no penalties for being ignorant or reckless. Someone might figure out that it’s going to cost them some sales, and they put some money in the PR budget to mitigate that.
This is the reason why billing information is better secured. The credit card companies take steps to make sure you’re being at least a little responsible with this information. And in the event it leaks, the company who failed to protect it pays a real cost in terms of higher fees or even losing the ability to accept cards at all. These numbers make sense to CEOs and MBAs, so spending money to avoid them also makes sense.
How to Stop It
There are obviously a large number of technological measures that can be put in place to improve security, but there’s one that is far simpler and much more foolproof. But first, let’s look at banks. Banks as we know it have been around for a few hundred years. I’d bet that you could prove that in every single year, banks got more secure. Massive vaults, bullet-proof windows, armed guards, motion detectors, security cameras, silent alarms, behavioral analysis, biometric monitors, the list goes on and on, and all of these things actually work very well. But banks still get robbed. All the time. When was the last time you heard of a bank robber getting caught on their first attempt? They are always linked to dozens of other robberies when they do get caught. Why?
Because they’re full of money.
They can make it harder to rob them. They can make it easier to catch the people who did it. But the odds don’t always matter to someone who sees a pile of money sitting there for them to take if they can bypass these tricks.
People break into networks for many reasons, but the user data is often the pile of gold that they seek. So the most effective way to stop someone from breaking in and stealing it is to not have it in the first place. This advice works in 2011, it will work in 2020. It works on Windows, OS X and Linux. It works online and offline, mobile or laptop, and so on.
“The first rule of security club is you try not to join security club: minimize the amount of user data you store.” – Ben Adida
So if you’re in a situation where you need to figure out if your data is secure enough, or how to secure it, start with this question: Do you need it in the first place? Usability people say they want it. Marketing people say they need it. If you’re an engineer, it’s a losing battle to argue those points, because they’re right. Stop convincing people why you shouldn’t do it, and put a cost on it so they have to convince each other that it’s worth it.
Anyone who went to business school knows the cost/value balance of inventory. It’s pretty straightforward to discuss whether a warehouse should be kept opened or expanded or closed. Nobody wants to store anything for too long, or make too much product or have too many materials. But ask them about how much user data you should be storing and the response will be something like “all of it, why wouldn’t we?”.
So make sure that the conversion bump from using full names asking age and gender and doing geo-targeting covers the cost of the security measures required to protect that data. Make it clear that those costs are actually avoidable, they are not sunk. They are also not a one-time investment. They should show up every quarter on the bottom line of anyone who uses that data. And if nobody wants to pay for it, well, you’ve just solved a major part of your security problem, haven’t you?
Update 10/18/2011: “FTC Privacy Czar To Entrepreneurs: “If You Don’t Want To See Us, Don’t Collect Data You Don’t Need”