Decline in Personal Service

More has changed on the human side of the airline equation than just the name change from stewardesses to flight attendants. First class isn't first class, and it goes downhill from there. The airlines seem to be testing the limits to see just how much abuse people will takeand they wonder why they occasionally deal with passenger rage. Sadly, the IT industry has never been big on personal service. There were exceptions, back in the glory days of big blue. We had a bit of trouble with an IBM mainframe, and they tossed a squad of technicians into an airplane and dropped them by parachute into our parking lot. Until the technicians dropped on target, vice presidents would call every 15 minutes to apprise us of the location of the plane. Okay, I am kidding, but not by much. Those of us in IT security should take heed. I hope you understand what your CEO is thinking right now. He gave you money for security after 9/11 because it seemed to be the right thing to do. You still got hit by worms. He increased ITSEC to 5% of the IT budget. You still got hit by worms. Now you are in a meeting thinking about asking the CEO for unplanned money to implement a NIPS or HIPS solution. I strongly suggest you invest time in looking at your requirements, making sure that you choose the best technology for your needs and that customer service is part of the budget request so the people impacted by the active defense layer you are thinking about implementing will have someone intelligent and caring to call.

Nowadays, the IT industry has two primary features: bad software and worse service. One of the advantages of this book is that the entire author team has pragmatic experience with most of the commercial and freeware perimeter products on the market, including the rapidly changing personal firewall market. We can't do much to help you with the bad software, and we never intend to bash any vendoreach has its foibles. However, we can help you in finding ways to meet your mission goals despite the flaws in the technology we each use. We devote an entire chapter of the book to implementing defense components, such as personal firewalls at a host level, to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls and know what technology is available. The latest generation of Host Intrusion Protection Systems (HIPS), which are essentially personal firewalls with operating system shims to trap dangerous operating system interrupts, have already proved themselves in production and are an important and valuable layer of defense.