Posts tagged ‘Ars Technica’
HBGary Federal Loses Its Way
Notice at HBGary Federal RSA Booth
The biggest story coming out of the RSA show this week has been the public embarrassment suffered by the security firm HBGary Federal. If current reporting is accurate, it’s a sobering story of online dangers and unprofessional behavior on the part of the company.
The hacker group Anonymous penetrated the computers of HBGary Federal on February 6, defacing the web site and releasing over 40,000 internal emails onto the Internet. The email exchanges reveal a running feud between Anonymous and Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary. Barr claimed to have discovered the real identities of members of the group, which has conducted pro-WikiLeaks attacks on Visa and Mastercard and is under FBI investigation. Here’s background from Ars Technica.
When Barr threatened to reveal these identities, Anonymous instead took out HBGary Federal. Here are my three takeaways of mistakes made by the company — again, based on reporting to date.
- Security firms need to practice what they preach — Basically, HBGary Federal made three security mistakes they most certainly counsel clients not to do. They used a custom Content Management System (CMS) for their site that was very susceptible to a SQL injection attack. They used a weak algorithm to protect their passwords, and finally the passwords themselves were very short and simple, and were used for multiple applications. Very basic, best practice type stuff. Here’s Ars Technica again with full detail.
- Business is business, not personal — It’s clear CEO Barr took this online contest too personally. If some reports are to be believed, he was doing this to drum up publicity for an upcoming conference address. Even if those reports are incorrect, Barr did not seem to consider how his actions could damage the company he led.
- Compete fiercely, but don’t cross the line — After studying the leaked HBGary Federal documents, the New York Times reported that documents suggest HBGary Federal and two other companies offered to target critics of Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Methods included using online research to discover embarrassing personal information about opponents, and the release of falsified information.
The Internet is a dangerous place for sure, as I wrote about recently. There’s nothing wrong with being passionate about what you do (you’d better be), or with competing fiercely or even with opposition research, up to a point.
Perhaps more facts will emerge around this story. For now it seems Barr acted irresponsibly- by not following security best practices, and by losing his emotional and moral perspective. Unfortunately, everyone at HBGary Federal is now paying the price.
The Key Ingredient for Thought Leadership — Thoughts
Thought leadership is very important in public relations. It is incredibly powerful when your client is seen an an expert in his or her field, and it makes earned media coverage much easier to secure.
But sometimes clients assume that thought leadership is simply a process PR pros have mastered, when it really starts with them. Some can’t devote much time to PR activities that don’t specifically tout their company. Others are very conservative with public statements, and avoid taking a clear position on issues affecting their market.
That may be appropriate in certain situations, but it does not lead to thought leadership.
Successful thought leadership requires four things:
- Deep market understanding
- Time invested into supporting the PR effort
- The willingness and ability to articulate interesting positions on relevant issues
- The ability to execute quickly
Recently one of my clients had a success that demonstrates well how the process can work. The client is GovDelivery, and Scott Burns is the CEO and Co-Founder. www.govdelivery.com
A couple of months ago there was an excellent post from Tim Lee in Ars Technica about a research paper out of Princeton University. Basically the paper was saying that government web sites were failures and the focus should be on sharing better structured information directly with the public: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080603-study-gov-websites-should-focus-on-rss-xmlnot-redesigns.html
Because GovDelivery serves so many federal, state and local government entities, Scott has a clear, front line understanding of the challenges government web masters face. While the Princeton paper raised some good points, it is flat out wrong about the failure of government web sites to serve the public.
So Scott invested the time to write a detailed post on his Reach the Public blog, clearly expressing his views and taking issue with the Princeton paper:
http://govdelivery.com/blog/2008/06/structured-content-has-benefit.html
That post in turn attracted the attention of Federal Computer Week, which offered Scott a contributed article based on his blog post. The column ran on August 4:
http://www.fcw.com/print/22_24/comment/153323-1.html
Know your market, invest the time, articulate an interesting position — and then execute. This kind of success is exactly what we mean at Strategic Communications Group when we talk about “great work for great clients.”
Home Is Where the Fiber Is
Really interesting article from Tim Lee of Ars Technica about customer owned residential fiber. Yes you read that right — a pilot program in Ottawa ran fiber to 400 homes, and the residents own the last mile. Sure gives Fiber to the Home (FTTH) a whole new meaning:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/customer-owned-fiber.ars
While this could insert a fascinating wild card into the broadband access/net neutrality debate here in the States, Lee is realistic about the challenges and the time frame:
It’s a tantalizing prospect, but a lot of practical difficulties will have to be overcome to make it a reality. Incumbent telecom firms may not like the prospect of increased competition, and they’ve never been shy about using regulatory barriers to strangle potential competitors in red tape. Meanwhile, promoters of the concept face a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: a customer-owned fiber strand is only useful if there is robust competition among ISPs at the other end, but companies aren’t going to enter the residential ISP market until there’s a critical mass of customer-owned fiber.
Most importantly, it’s not yet clear how the economics will work. The Ottawa trial suggests that a fiber connection can cost less than $3000 per household, but the exact cost depends heavily on site geography and the rate of customer uptake. It will take several years for the concept to prove itself. And, if it does, it will take a number of additional years for it to be widely adopted.
Right now there is a battle going for these kinds of affluent residential customers, but only in specific zip codes. Back in March I wrote about an interesting Yankee Group report that highlighted telcos and cable companies battling fiercely to offer triple play services in the most lucrative urban neighborhoods. If an appreciable number of such homes started owning their own fiber connections, and if that fiber reached to a peering point serviced by multiple ISPs, choice could be greatly increased and the cost of service greatly decreased.
http://cparente.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/iptv-turning-gorillas-into-guerrillas/
Two huge ifs of course, and nothing will happen soon. And choice for those who can afford the estimated $3,000 cost doesn’t do anything for those who don’t have broadband access for economic reasons. But consumer ownership of the last mile at some point could be part of a more comprehensive policy discussion that acknowledges both the essential nature of broadband access and the cost involved in providing it.
Gimme the Speed, and I’ll Find the Services?
A new survey came out during a Broadband Policy conference here in DC. It was put on by Pike and Fischer, a subsidiary of BNA (http://www.bna.com/about/companies.htm) that looks at broadband from a policy perspective: http://www.broadbandpolicysummit.com/
The survey found that 40% of attendees ranked high speed as the most appealing advanced service, substantially more than services like HDTV or digital phone service. It’s a small sample of 280 people and it would be nice to see more details about the survey without having to buy the full $600 report (hint hint P&F), but Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica uses it to lead a good post on broadband that weaves in other recent studies from Akamai and the Communications Workers of America. The conclusion is we need to do a better job in this country:
Despite this difference, it’s clear that the US has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to broadband speeds. Pike & Fischer points out the fairly obvious (to us geeks, anyway): without high broadband speeds, millions of other features being offered to us by cable companies and telcos will have a harder time getting off the ground. “This suggests to us that, while multichannel video providers may be spending a lot of their ad dollars promoting their high-def channels and their ‘triple-play’ bundles, they still rely on their broadband speeds to seal the deal with customers,” Pike & Fischer Broadband Advisory Services Scott Sleek said in a statement. “Every one wants to claim that they offer the fastest Internet access, and believe that will be more important to customers than how many HD channels they offer.”
Drew Clark of BroadbandCensus.com was in attendance, and here’s his take on the keynote address by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: http://broadbandcensus.com/blog/?p=23
I know Drew, and will try to get in touch with him for some additional color on the event. Of course the rub is how to get more speed to millions of Americans. What’s the biggest gating item — lack of accurate information, infrastructure investment, government support, consumer adoption to justify the investment needed for fiber to the home?
Content providers, service providers and government all have their particular perspectives, but can’t the parties work together and craft a strategy that serves the national interest while at the same time making economic sense?
Back to the Future — The Browser War
Fierce competition is back on the web browser front. After Microsoft crushed the Netscape challenge in the mid to late 90′s, Microsoft Explorer cruised for years as the overwhelming leader in the web browser market. It still is, with approximately 75% market share. But out of the Netscape defeat rose the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that launched the open source Firefox browser and has been refining it since. Here’s a good overview from Brad Stone of the NY Times:
Yesterday Microsoft struck back announcing a deal with Hewlett-Packard. Starting in January 2009 Microsoft’s Live Search will be the default search engine on all HP computers, taking that spot away from Yahoo. The deal is for North America only — Microsoft probably decided it has enough anti-trust issues right now with the European Union. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand has a typically good piece, highlighting the US market share numbers of the various PC manufacturer/search engine alliances. I also like the idea he floats — why not cut consumers in with lower PC prices when the manufacturer gets big $$ from the search companies?
It fails to mention that HP will gain cash through the deal for effectively selling out their users. That’s not to single out Microsoft. The Google-Dell deal is exactly the same situation. Yes, in both cases, the computer owners are getting access to good search resources. But maybe the vendors should charge less for computer where they benefit by choosing for the consumer? Or maybe they need to disclose more fully why the defaults are the way they are?
http://searchengineland.com/080602-090000.php
But the struggle isn’t over when the default is set. Users can of course change their search option. Or they can be cajoled/coerced into doing so. Here’s a piece from Danny last year on that mostly behind-the-scenes battle:
http://searchengineland.com/070115-111111.php
There is one element of the HP/MS deal Danny doesn’t focus on, maybe because its not related to search. In addition to Live Search being the default on HP computers, Microsoft’s Silverlight animation software will be built in as well. This is the MS product that competes with Flash, and having millions of computers on the market that can view Silverlight without needing any plug-ins should be a big market advantage. Ars Technica thinks that will end up being more significant than the default search element:
Personally I prefer Firefox. It seems faster than Explorer, and useful add-ons like the Alexa traffic reader are easy to implement. I don’t mind that Firefox has decided for me that Google should be my default choice for search — at least not yet. We users need to remember we can always make up our own minds.
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