Social Programming

You've seen the Hollywood shots where high tech geeks outwit their adversary and break into the servers of their target and accomplish their mission, right? But in real life, the biggest cyber vulnerabilities that corporations face come from "Social Programming" despite spending millions of dollars on high tech security gizmos.

Ok, so here's the catch: hackers, professional thieves and malcontents are smarter than we give them credit for -- and instead of going head to head with the latest gadgets, they often figure out how to take advantage of your corporation's social programming to side step your security and get inside your perimeter with much less hassle.

Social Programming is the set of recurring and predictable behaviors that hackers, malcontents and professional thieves use to steal valuable data and trade secrets, exact revenge, spy and wreak havoc. The act of taking advantage of these behaviors has been nicknamed "Social Engineering" by security experts. In plain English, social engineering is simply the act of deceiving people using emotional and psychological tricks.

The good news is that Social Programing can also be used to secure your corporate assets and dramatically strengthen your security efficacy. However, unlike IT "solutions" which can be implemented more or less in a silo, social programming is a firm-wide art that is central to corporate governance choices typically made by the CEO and board of directors.

So for all the whiz bang technology employed to "secure" corporations, interestingly, even in the realm of cyber risk, it comes down to people. The best recent example of this is Target. They spent millions on gadgets. And zero on social programming. Want to guess where their weak link was? Yup -- if you guessed "social programming" you're right. In the 4th quarter of 2013, their data breach cost them $61mm -- which was just the start. And in executive terms, that breach ultimately lead to the CIO and CEO losing their jobs.

If you want "hard core" security results, then it is time to also include social programming in your arsenal, which is far from soft in terms of its impact.