Security and the Media

CSO — Recently we published Bob Violino’s article on how to deal with the media during a crisis. In this article, we (the media) advise you to treat us as trustworthy friends. Blatantly self-serving of us, wouldn’t you say? I would.

Well, there’s a reason for the story aside from the desire to make our reporting jobs easier. CSO’s editorial staff observed the tabletop exercise at our Perspectives conference this past spring. The scenario involved a physical intrusion that might (or might not) have compromised the victim company’s core intellectual property. The roles of both victim and media were played by security professionals like yourself. The relationship between the two groups started poorly and got worse. “Everything we saw from the company looked like a cover-up, whether there was one or not,” was the comment of one attendee playing the role of a media reporter. His natural response was to dig harder and to try to go around the company’s PR function.

Antagonism between media and security is no surprise. When we launched CSO, one observer of the publishing industry questioned our chances: “Will they be able to get tight-lipped security pros to give up the details of security breaches?” To us, that kind of “gotcha” story has never been the main goal, because as we planned our launch, CSOs told us they could already find breach stories all over the place. “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old adage in the newspaper business—the more violent or sensational the cover, the more copies would fly off the newsstand. That philosophy explains why lost laptops show up on page one in the national media, and security success stories show up—well—they rarely show up anywhere. What CSOs want instead of breaches (you tell us) is best practices. What works, not what failed. And that’s where we focus the bulk of our attention. ChoicePoint is really the only company I can think of that we’ve taken to the woodshed (though our publisher has beaten up TJX a few times), and that was in response to an extraordinary confluence of failed oversight and subsequent excuse-making by that company. Still, there’s no question that intrusions and disasters do occur. So there’s a time and place to dig into the details of those breakdowns. And there is a time to talk about what to do during a crisis so that the otherwise bloodthirsty mainstream media reacts to your pain in as constructive a manner as possible. I think you’ll find Violino’s article most useful in that regard.

-Derek Slater, dslater@cxo.com