DigiNotar Goes Bankrupt After Hack 136
twoheadedboy writes "DigiNotar, the Dutch certificate authority which was recently at the centre of a significant hacking case, has been declared bankrupt. The CA discovered it was compromised on 19 July, leading to 531 rogue certificates being issued. It was only in August that the attacks became public knowledge. Now the company has gone bankrupt, parent firm VASCO said today. VASCO admitted the financial losses associated with the demise of DigiNotar would be 'significant.' It all goes to show how quickly a data breach can bring down a company."
Adds reader Orome1: "This is unsurprising, since a report issued by security audit firm Fox-IT, who has been hired to investigate the now notorious DigiNotar breach, revealed that things were far worse than we were led to believe."
Security is expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Businesses have a strong profit motive. The people who run businesses are greedy. They will sacrifice everything, including security related expenses in order to boost profits in some way.
I think this is simply obvious.
Re:Bankrupt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. On the one hand, they deserve to go bankrupt for failing at the one thing that justified their existence, but dumping the corpse before it can be properly examined smells iffy.
Note that you don't have to be charged with anything to go bankrupt, though. When all your customers leave, you suddenly have no revenue, but you still have your costs. And since it's obvious to everybody that DigiNotar will go bankrupt anyway, nobody loans them money, they quickly lack the money to pay salaries and other costs, and suddenly they're bankrupt.