Recently, Premera Blue Cross, a health plan in the Pacific Northwest, was hit with the second-biggest cyberattack in healthcare industry history, exposing the personal, financial and medical information of more than 11 million customers. Only six weeks before, Anthem, the nation’s largest investor-owned healthcare organization, announced that it had been victim of a breach subjecting nearly 80 million records of customers to exposure.
This past October 29 marked the two year anniversary of super storm Hurricane Sandy making landfall in the Northeastern US. Despite ample warning, critical infrastructure wasn’t prepared for the impact that this storm would have, and essential services failed. Reflecting on this anniversary, I began thinking about the lessons we learned, or should have learned from our past experience. I’ll relate a story from a close friend and respected banking technologist: