That’s Where The Money Is

Riverbank Ruminations; Observations from The Banks of The Technology River

Tom Evans ~  Ashton Engineer Emeritus

Supposedly Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks said “That’s where the money is”. Like many quotes some investigation reveals that might not be true. This article offers some explanation as to how this may have come to be attributed to Sutton. It is interesting that there is something called Sutton’s Law taught in medical school. Wikipedia says the following about it:

Sutton’s law states that when diagnosing, one should first consider the obvious. It suggests that one should first conduct those tests which could confirm (or rule out) the most likely diagnosis. It is taught in medical schools to suggest to medical students that they might best order tests in that sequence which is most likely to result in a quick diagnosis, hence treatment, while minimizing unnecessary costs.

Where Does Your Data Reside?

So while the quote may not be true, the principle is valid. Where is your data? Is it on your laptop? Is it on your server? Where is your server, in your office or in the cloud? Where is your financial information? If your bank has it, where do they keep it? The answer, especially with the migration to the cloud, is the internet. It is hard to imagine how much data is on the internet. A quick search gives a variety of answers.

• Science Focus says the big four (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook) hold an estimated 1,200 petabytes. That’s 1,200,00 terabytes or 1,200,000,000 gigabytes. This number leaves out a lot of stored data (Dropbox for one).
• Back in 2016 Cisco estimated global traffic for data transfer at over a zettabyte. How much is that? One Zettabyte is approximately equal to a 1,000 Exabytes, 1,000,000 petabytes, 1,000,000,000 Terabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000 Gigabytes.

So the internet is where the data is. If the bad guys want it, how hard is it to get? It depends. If you want data from a government military site, you have your work cut out for you. What happens if you just want to blackmail someone with details of their private life. You could just wander around the internet and look for unsecured data. Some researchers were doing that and came up with 845 gigabytes of VERY personal data. The data was for several ‘dating’ web sites. It included names, pictures, photos, voice messages, financial transactions. Hundreds of thousands of users were exposed.

What did the researchers have to do to get to this data? Nothing. The data was on an Amazon server but was totally unsecured. Amazon provides customers complete documentation for securing these servers. It just wasn’t done. The data was there for the taking. The researchers informed the owners and the server was secured. There is no way of knowing if anyone else found this information and copied it for later use.

So the main question for you is: Where is your data? Do you really know? If you have a server in the ‘cloud’, where is that exactly? Do you know that it is secure? Do you have documentation to show that it is secure? If you don’t know where your data is, you really need to find out.

Is Your Data Secure? Is It Accessible?

Keep in mind that even people whose business is data get breached. Before you commit your data to storage, you really need to know how it will be protected. Get it in writing. Do you have your own private ‘cloud’? How well is it protected and exactly how? If you are using a shared service like Amazon, keep in mind that they are only providing a platform. It is up to you to secure it. If you have your business hosted by a cloud provider, it falls to you to make sure proper data security is part of the package. If your provider can’t explain and document how your data is safe, you need a new provider.

Another issue with data being on the internet is accessibility. We kind of take for granted that we can access the internet. What happens if you can’t? Let’s say you have your employees connecting back to the office and a car hits a pole in front of your office and knocks your office off the internet. Now what?

With the migration to a remote workforce, what happens if your employee can’t access the internet through their home internet? Do they sit idle until their provider fixes it? What happens if the pole in front of their house is knocked down.

The internet is where the data is. You can’t touch it but you can protect it. If you don’t oversee that protection, no one else will. The bad guys know it is out there and they are looking for it. You might not be the lucky one whose data is discovered to be exposed by a white hat hacker.  If you’re not sure where your data is, whether it’s safe, and how easily accessible it is, you need to call Ashton Technology Solutions at 216 397-4080.