RSA Chief: Last Year's Breach Has Silver Lining

alphadogg writes "Last year's industry-shaking RSA Security breach has resulted in customers' CEOs and CIOs engaging much more closely with the vendor to improve their organizations' security, according to the head of RSA. Discussing the details of the attack that compromised its SecurID tokens has made RSA sought after by companies that want to prevent something similar from happening to them, Executive Chairman Art Coviello said in an interview with Network World. 'If there's a silver lining to the cloud that was over us from April through over the summer it is the fact that we've been engaged with customers at a strategic level as never before,' Coviello says, 'and they want to know in detail what happened to us, how we responded, what tools we used, what was effective and what was not.'"

Re:its amazing what publicity

[vlm]

You pay them the big dollars because they're supposed to already know what they're doing and have good practice already in place the day you shake hands.

Actually you pay them because its faster / better / cheaper than doing it yourself, not because they are perfect. If 50% of the population is below the median, they only have to achieve a 50% median solution to capture about 50% of the market. The actual percentages are probably much higher, regardless they certainly don't have to be 100% perfect to make money.

The other reason you pay money is to have someone else to blame for the inevitable headaches. As long as your boss yells at them for an outsourced solution instead of you for an insourced solution, that was money well spent.

Re:Silver Lininig for their Bottom Line

[msauve]

Paypal doesn't use RSA tokens. They use ones from Symantec (which they bought from Verisign).