“Any time we have to come out and publicly apologize for an incident, we lose face,and eventually our customers lose trust in our service.” These are words from a senior executive at a large high tech firm. But the sentiment is becoming increasingly common.
In the past 18 months, there have been a number of service outages due to underlying vulnerabilities and external information technology platform compromises involving large online service providers.
Each of these incidents resulted in substantial economic and reputational harm for both the online service providers and their customers. They also had substantial legal and financial consequences. In March, online service provider Evernote was hacked,resulting in 50 million users receiving requests to change their passwords. The month before, the personal information for 250,000 Twitter users was stolen. The incidents go on and on.
