Brent Easley

Brent,

Great article. I also read that Obama appointed the first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of the federal government. This is definitely a time in which cyber crime starts to play a vital role in our national security. Cyber war crimes are prevalent by Middle East countries trying to hijack systems here in the US to gain intelligence.

This new was all over the internet. It seems like Obama starts to pay attention on cyber crime after what happened to Hilary Clinton. For short term, they should worry about if hackers attack on election day. For long term, they need to prepared for cyber way because nowadays information is more valuable than anything else. It is great to see that president begins to consider cyber security as an important factor.

Maybe it’s just me, but asking the government to provide guidance to private industry on cyber security is suspect at best. Government systems are some of the least well maintained systems in the country. They are far behind industry on patching and hardening, and there testers often have there hands tied as they are required to use government built tools rather that tapping in the open source community. Guess we’ll see.

Wade

Although an executive order to modernize our systems to increase their security is a step in the right direction, this is way overdue. In 2015 the Office of Personnel Management leaked 21.5 million government employee records containing personal information. In the private sector, this would be unacceptable and organizations would be faced with hefty regulatory fines and penalties. In this case, the Director of OPM was forced to resign, but I don’t think our government officials are held accountable for security. Again, this is a necessary executive order, but this way overdue and will take years to implement.

Very interesting article. I know a lot of sports team these days are investing heavily into data and analytics. The Phillies for example hired an ex-Google employee to run their baseball statistics program and invested over a million dollars in a data analytics system. Now that more teams are moving towards evaluating potential players using information systems, instead of the classical way of scouting them, I wonder if they will start taking cyber security seriously.

Brent,
This is an interesting article. Contrary to what many believe, hacking does not require a ton of technical knowledge, or sophisticated hacking techniques to gain control of a system. Employees should seek permission to wipe their personal laptops prior to leaving a company. Also, it is never a good idea to reuse passwords. I agree, if they would have had a password policy and a dual-factor authentication control in place, it may have reduced the likelihood that Correa would have been able to breach the Astros’ Ground Control system. Also, many professional sports teams are not resorting to Big Data Analytics to assist with scouting, and identifying trends in what makes players successful. SAP has done several implementations of its HANA software in professional organizations to assist teams with analyzing data.

From what I’ve heard, the Astro’s security processes were ineffective. They reset the password, but did not count on the fact that the attacker had access to victims email, so he got the new password. We don’t cover much about incident response in this course, but one take away is to keep digging once you see a compromise. It is pretty rare that only one thing is compromised.