Dairy Queen Data Breach Impacts Arizona Business Owners
After a few weeks of speculation, Diary Queen has confirmed that nearly 400 locations were compromised in a recent data security breach. Among the 400 locations affected, 9 were local Arizona businesses.
Wi-Fi for SMB - Things to Consider
I came across a good little article [^1] earlier in the week about setting up guest Wi-Fi and I think it should really hit home with many small business owners. Simply throwing up a wireless access point and connecting it to the rest of your network so guests can have internet access is a great way to cause yourself a whole lot of pain. Not only does doing something like that have harsh PCI compliance ramifications, your systems are wide open to anyone connecting to your Wi-Fi. Depending on the range your access point allows you could have a data breach without the attacker even setting foot on your property giving any physical controls you may have in place a zero chance of working.
Weekly Wrap Up | Oct 10, 2014
This week's wrap up includes information on failing incident response, an update on the Chase Bank data breach, Jimmy Johns data breach, and the Good Will data breach.
Bus Factor
Many of you may be familiar with bus factor, lottery, truck factor, and/or bus/truck number. For those that aren't though, I wanted to take a small moment to explain it. The concept is quite simple. This "factor" is nothing more than a scary way of labelling the number of developers a project could stand to lose (get hit by a bus) before the project couldn't continue. People have various events in their lives that permit or prevent them from performing certain tasks. As with software development someone's ability to keep working on a project could be taken away by changing jobs, getting a promotion, winning the lottery and quitting, or the more tragic getting hit by a bus/truck.
SMB Data Breach Fallout
For any organization a data breach is a disruptive experience. Besides the distraction from daily operations, and unwanted publicity, a data breach brings a huge financial burden as well. Most large businesses have the resources to weather the storm, but many small and mid size businesses aren't as fortunate. Most SMBs don't have the capital or technical talent on staff to properly respond to a data security breach. Given that 71% of data breaches target small businesses, I thought it would be beneficial to discuss the fallout of a security breach and the impact it could have to a small business.