Tag Archives: business

November 12, 2014 · 2:03 pm

Let’s Go Phishing!

Google put out a fascinating white paper on phishing attacks. No, it has nothing to do with a great jam band. If a title like Handcrafted Fraud and Extortion: Manual Account Hijacking In The Wild doesn’t get your attention, you’re not curious enough! It’s an interesting study on how online accounts are hijacked, usually leading to financial losses, stolen identities, and lots of other bad stuff.

The short version is that it’s basically human engineering – no fancy software involved. Taking advantage of people’s good natures, thieves mislead the recipients of their emails to give up details such as account login credentials or bank card information. Yes, there may be fake web pages involved (you DO know how to spot a fake, malformed URL, right?) but most of how these thieves hack in is based on ignorance, laziness, or both.

What can you do about this? Google recommends you should report suspicious-looking messages and you should type in URL’s to visit websites directly to login, rather than clicking through a link in your email program. As it turns out, there is also a pretty effective method for combatting phishing attacks called 2 step authentication.  Most platforms – Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others – use it and you should activate it for your accounts.  It means you’ll get a code texted to you which you must input to log in.  Does it add 15 seconds to a log in?  Yes, but it makes it extremely difficult for someone to hack your account unless they steal your phone too.  As the study shows, device theft is not at all a prevalent issue for hacking and this method has allowed Google to stop 99% of hijackings in the last few years.

It’s a good business lesson too.  We should spend more time thinking about systems that will prevent issues.  I suspect many of us think a lot about backups to repair damage but not enough about how to prevent it in the first place.  It may not be technology or software we need.  As with phishing, a bit of training and a heightened awareness of potential threats to the business can prevent a lot of fixing later on.

You agree?

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November 11, 2014 · 11:23 am

Happy Veteran’s Day!

Happy Veteran’s Day! If today’s screed seems familiar, it’s because I was reviewing what I wrote on this holiday last year and I decided I couldn’t improve my thinking so I’m letting the post loose on you all once more.  I hope you share my thinking, both about the post and the day.  Back to the usual raving tomorrow.

Often when a national holiday approaches I’ll go back over my posts to see what I’ve written about the day in the past.  I’ve written about Veteran’s Day, which we celebrate today, here, here, and here.

Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I vet...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feel free to go back and read them but I noticed a common theme that I want to repeat and  pretty big omission that I want to correct.

In each of those posts I thank our men and women who served to protect and defend this country.  I do again.  “My war” would have been Vietnam just as my Dad’s was WWII.  He served when his time came because he was needed; I didn’t since the war was winding down and the draft was ending.  Putting the politics aside is almost impossible when discussing the differences between those two conflicts but the service given by those who went is indistinguishable.

I also draw an inelegant analogy between those folks selfless service to us and how businesses ought to be dedicated to serving their customers.  I also touch upon the teamwork needed to succeed.  A long time ago Fast Company published an article which cited an interesting study:

After World War II, the US military commissioned S.L.A. Marshall, a Harvard historian, to do a remarkable study. The question he was asked to research was, literally, why are men willing to die in war? Marshall was allowed to advance and test a variety of explanations. Patriotism – people would die for their country. Or family – men would fight and die to protect their wives and children. The answer that finally emerged was small-group integrity. In a group of people where each is truly committed to the others, no one will be the first to run. So they all stand and fight together.

You know I’m a big proponent of teamwork and believe it’s critical to business success.  The article goes on to talk about managerial courage and how it’s tested and that brings up the omission I want to correct.  Too many of us talk about business as war from time to time, just as we do comparing sports to combat.  We need to stop that.  I used to say that the best part of what I did was that when I screwed up nobody died.  Protecting one’s country for a lousy salary and risking a life can in no way be compared to playing a game for a lot of money or running a business for an obscene amount.

So to my Dad, my other family members, schoolmates, and the millions who stepped forward when their time came to serve I say thank you.  We voted last week – you made that possible.  Think about that as you conduct your business the rest of this week and you serve customers. clients, and commercial causes, hopefully as well as the Vets served us.

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November 4, 2014 · 12:24 pm

Mine! Mine!

Two of my current clients are start-ups. They’re small but getting bigger. Although there are a number of challenges in this environment one big challenge that I used to see all the time in the “big” corporate world is missing and it’s a wonderful thing.

Big companies tend to breed silos and possessiveness. You don’t really get that in a start-up since everyone is overlapping and helping with almost everyone else. Those silos are a huge problem, as is the possessive nature of the executives involved since that fosters them. Want an example?

I saw an article yesterday which reported on a study conducted for Yes Lifestyle Marketing. This is some of what was in the study:

A sizable chunk of marketers are having trouble coordinating efforts between divisions, and well over half think their marketing departments don’t even share common goals. Generally, oversight under one group seems to be lacking at a lot of companies with 68% of respondents saying enterprise marketing executives lack central ownership of programs across channels.

According to the study, poor data practices appear to be one of the biggest reasons for the failure of multichannel marketing programs. Only 37 percent of enterprise organizations and 29 percent of mid-market companies have a central repository for customer data. Less than a third of marketing executives overall said their companies centralize customer data into a single record across channels.

That data division and lack of coordination seems not to be an oversight. In other words, turf wars are derailing marketing, and that is having a negative effect.  One could also look to the other types of conflicts (read turf battles) between sales and marketing, IT and marketing, and even business analysts (the dreaded “strat planning” department) and everyone else in some companies. How can we fix this?  In the words of my Mom: “Oh grow up.”

The start-up mentality of interdependence is visible every day when the entire company is in a small space.   Out of sight, out of mind might just hold in bigger companies.  Maybe it’s easier to vilify the group on the other floor.  There is no “mine” other than accountability for the goals the entire group is trying to achieve.  You can’t win if other members of the team lose, not in the long-term anyway.

Those are my thoughts.  Yours?

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