Comments on: Why We Fight

By: ed dickson

ed dickson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:54:39 +0000

I sometimes wonder when the bottom is going to fall out on all of this.
What happened to the philosophy that businesses existed to serve the needs of their customer?

By: Master Yoda

Master Yoda — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:28:09 +0000

Impatient this one is! Teach him, I cannot!

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:15:45 +0000

Unlike Choicepoint, TJX is not in the information business, so it is not so critical to them. How they arrange their goods for sale is probably more important than information security to their value.
However, a general inability to do things well will hurt them in the long run. Bad security indicates an inattention to detail. I think that how TJX responds will show whether this is a hiccup or a downward trend.

By: beri

beri — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 08:35:56 +0000

Sad, isn’t it, that the company puts hundreds of thousands of its customers at risk and says that they don’t want to stockholders to worry. Management isn’t paying too much attention to this problem. And of course, yesterday they announced that the problem actually went back at least a year and not a month as they had previously stated. So it’s really true that management isn’t paying attention.
capitalism at the highest level.

By: Iang (Market for Silver Bullets)

Iang (Market for Silver Bullets) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 08:11:08 +0000

It’s good to fight :) But to be fair, a data breach shouldn’t be worth 2% of a company’s value. If it is there is likely something else wrong.
The expected value of the loss should be something like the number of sets, times the probability of each as a loss, times the value. Plus costs. As losing 10k sets seems to indicate that far less are perverted, e.g. 100s, then the expected loss should be quite low.
I’d predict that the costs are (a) well known at this stage and (b) dominate the expected individual loss, and therefore (c) the loss to the company is easy to factor in.