• Findings from the Fort Hood shooting underscores today’s incident response reality

    08 Feb 2011

    You may have heard about this in the news over the weekend: apparently the Army psychiatrist turned Islamic extremist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in November 2009 could’ve been prevented had the FBI and Army been communicating with one another.

    Sadly the same poor communication exists in the corporate world. Along the same lines of this incident, based on what I see in my security assessments I can confidently say that any substantial data breach in any given enterprise is not going to be handled properly. There are breakdowns leading up to incidents and failures on the reactive side of the equation. It’s information systems complexity intertwined with the human propensity to ignore the obvious and push things off until they HAVE to be addressed just waiting to be exploited.

    There are two other takeaways from this that cannot be ignored:
    1) failed communications between government agencies always has been a problem and always will be – especially as government grows
    2) government – including the police – is incapable of keeping us safe all the time

    In both our personal lives and at work it pays to be vigilant.