Is Cybersecurity Failure One Of Your Options?

Very recently we came across the obituary for Ed Smylie. Mr. Smylie was a mechanical engineer at NASA in April of 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission went awry. With under two days of oxygen left, the crew in space had to rely on Mr. Smylie's team on earth to concoct a mechanism to clean the carbon dioxide from the capsule's air.

The answer was: duct tape.

In the 1995 film version of the incident the lead flight director, Gene Kranz, speaks a famous line: "Failure is not an option."

Is failure an option in your company's cybersecurity process?

If you discover that your organization had a cybersecurity incident, which of these two responses is the honest story you will relay to your leadership? 

(a) an adversary beat our cybersecurity system; or

(b) it seems there was a previously unknown flaw in our cybersecurity system that the adversary exploited.

The only way you can honestly give response (a), that your system was beat, is if you can verify that it was working. That's ironic but accurate. Because if you can't verify that it was working, then the answer is (b): failure was apparently an option.

Drop us a line in the comment section (with or without duct tape) about how you have seen cybersecurity systems verified. 

Ask us how Pythia Cyber can work with you to create a best-in-class cybersecurity system that you can verify. Failure to protect your assets should not be an option.