[1]The story of Mary:
Mary spent a lot of time on the phone speaking with her CEO, general
counsel, CFO and other business leaders in her company and at those
she was evaluating for purchase. "A good deal doesn't get done on
email" she was fond of telling her co-workers. And it was true. So
as Mary was waiting on her delayed flight to board at Newark
International Airport one day, she decided to squeeze in one more
call to try and finalize the terms of a merger that was coming
together between her company and a competitor. What Mary didn't
consider, as she was singularly focused on that conversation, was
that she wasn't alone in her conversation. Sitting near her, and
listening to every word she said, was a financial reporter from a
well-known business website. He put two and two together pretty
easily. The pending merger would not be a secret for long.
You can use your imagination to guess what happened next. Story of
the pending merger, which Mary had finalized on the call that day,
broke online within 24 hours. Investors and speculators climbed all
over the stocks of both companies and the fallout drastically
changed the financial dynamics, effectively killing the deal. In the
end, Mary's company calculated that the failed merger attempt cost
them $12 million, not to mention the lost market opportunity and
value that the merger would have created. No one was ever able to
tie the leak directly to Mary, but since there were so few people
involved in the negotiations there were assumptions made. Mary's
career stalled after that.
(Via [2]CSO Online)
I've talked before about my role in defending against outsiders
learning about potential Mergers & Acquisition targets of a former
employer. So much around this is old-school physical security and
OpSec. It is challenging but fun work - very cloak and dagger.
The article is a nice reminder that all of your security budget going
toward shiny boxes and cool services doesn't protect against this very
real risk scenario.
Also on:
[3]Twitter
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My original entry is here: [4]The story of Mary. It posted Wed, 27 Jun
2018 20:31:57 +0000.
Filed under: business,
References
1.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3283331/security/the-story-of-mary.html#tk.rss_all
2.
http://www.csoonline.com/index.rss
3.
https://twitter.com/TokyoGringo/status/1012072122322219008
4.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=1235
