[00:00:30]2007年黑暗版历年阅读真题解析 第四篇

[00:01.18]It never rains but is pours.

[00:03.03]Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles,

[00:08.49]and improved their feeble corporation governance,

[00:11.60]a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—

[00:15.20]the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity.

[00:22.50]Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right,

[00:26.73]and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking,

[00:31.12]telecoms and air travel,

[00:33.10]information protection is now high on the boss's agenda in businesses of every variety.

[00:38.55]Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—

[00:44.14]from organizations as diverse as Time Warner,

[00:46.89]the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California,

[00:53.10]Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems

[00:58.06]and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.

[01:01.51]“Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset,”

[01:07.45]says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University’s business School,

[01:11.22]“The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value,

[01:15.55]which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders”.

[01:19.16]Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted

Accounting Principles (GAAP),

[01:24.04]perhaps it is time for GASP,

[01:26.88]Generally Accepted Security Practices,

[01:29.42]suggested Eli Noam of New York’s Columbia Business School.

[01:33.06]“Setting the proper investment level for security,

redundancy, and recovery is a management issue,

[01:40.20]not a technical one,” he says.

[01:42.32]The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss.

[01:47.68]Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust,

[01:50.96]that most valuable of economic assets,

[01:54.90]is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—

[01:58.52]and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.?

[02:06.43]The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—

[02:09.88]though not justified—

[02:11.32]by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage.

[02:14.83]Until California recently passed a law,

[02:17.10]American firms did not have to tell anyone,

[02:19.60]even the victim, when data went astray.

[02:22.56]That may change fast:

[02:24.12]lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.

[02:29.72]Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America,

[02:35.51]disclosed on June 17th,

[02:37.92]overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

[02:44.13]that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.