Due Diligence: What Business Can Learn From Government Failures

As you may recall the Office of Personnel Management had a major security breach in June, affecting 14 million individuals who hold security clearances. A recent Business Insider Article titled “The US agency plundered by Chinese hackers made one of the dumbest security moves possible” covers some of the major issues that led to the breach of information.

The article points out some “common sense” security practices, such as basic data encryption, that were overlooked by OPM. But encryption was not the biggest failure…not doing any due diligence on the service provider is what ultimately brought about the security breach.

The article highlights “that a systems administrator responsible for handling the agency's records "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China].” Source: Business Insider. In the world of national security, knowing who you're actually contracting with is a pretty big deal. In this case it appears that due diligence was completely overlooked.

The fact that OPM used a foreign based Read More...