Is it better to insure than secure? Maybe not.
You better dust off those old insurance policies that most of us look at
all too infrequently.
Midwestern supermarket
chain Schnucks has been
notified by their insurance carrier that they don’t plan to cover them for the
lawsuits resulting from the hacking incident in which customer’s credit card
numbers were exposed in a data breach at about 80% of their stores. The unauthorized access by the hackers
reportedly lasted for about four months before it was discovered.
The problem that
likely exists with your current insurance policy is that they were designed and
sold in a pre-Internet era. Data is not
considered tangible property by the insurance companies. Loss of such assets is normally only covered
by a specific cyber-insurance product.
Snuck’s has more
problems than the lawsuits by customers.
A card payment company and several banks are also making claims. Click HERE to read more on this at SC Security Magazine and then run over to that old-fashion
filing cabinet and pull your policies to see what they say.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.