Where Are The Infosec Activists

In continuing our exploration of the world of Corporate risk and the markets we will take a look at the role of activist investors, who they are and what they want. Activists are becoming a prominent factor in how the Board and C-Suite address investor demands. Their activities affect all aspects of a company and when they arrive your department may be in for the shock of its existence.

Who are the activists and what do they want?

According to Investopedia an activist investor is:

An individual or group that purchases large numbers of a public company’s shares and/or tries to obtain seats on the company’s board with the goal of effecting a major change in the company. A company can become a target for activist investors if it is mismanaged, has excessive costs, could be run more profitably as a private company or has another problem that the activist investor believes it can fix to make the company more valuable.

The most common type of activist investor believes they can improve a company’s value for the shareholders by attempting to direct divestures, cost cutting measures, breaking up a big company, or a change in strategy. The more uncommon type of activist investor may buy shares and attempt to control a company for the purposes of making an ethical change such as environmentalism or removing child labor from the supply chain. Activist investors also fight among themselves, as Carl Ichan and Bill Ackman have been for years. Ichan likes Herbalife, while Ackman thinks it’s a scam (paraphrasing for him). Ackman even put up a site, Facts About Herbalife along with a 300+ slide presentation as to why they’re a ripoff. Ichan keeps buying the stock while Ackman was the biggest shortseller. When activists attack it will either make or break your company. These guys are serious about what they do. Starboard Value published a 294+ slide presentation on what needs to change at Darden Restaurants, especially at Olive Garden.

As you can guess, a lot of their activities are focused on cutting costs and increasing revenue. The latter is always great, but what happens to your Infosec or sustainability program when the Wall Street pole axe meets your budget? You should read what happened to Timkin. No, seriously you need to read it to understand what an activist takeover and breakup looks like. Bill George of Harvard Business School gives a hint,

“Activists think long term is 12 months and the first thing that goes is the stuff that pays off in five or 10 years,”

Let’s pretend you had an infosec program at Timkin. This is what you would be dealing with (****emphasis mine****)

Buried in a November Timken investor presentation is a chart bound to please Wall Street. Titled “Yesterday and Tomorrow,” it sketches how capital was allocated before the split, and how it will be used now. Pension fund contributions drop from nearly a third of cash flow to near zero, ****while capital spending is roughly halved. And instead of using 12 percent of cash flow to buy back stock, share repurchases will consume nearly half of cash flow over the next 18 months. In other words, less cash is being invested in the business or earmarked for benefits to employees, and more money is going to investors.**** While TimkenSteel’s board has authorized a three million share buyback by the end of 2016, Timken has plans to repurchase 10 million shares by the end of next year.

For academic purposes let’s assume all budgets will be cut by 50%. Don’t think it won’t happen. I’ve been on the buying end where the acquirer says cut everything by half in 1 year and tell management they’ll need to figure out how to make things work with half. In terms of Infosec and Environmental programs you look at what was required by law or regulation and then make a list of what wasn’t a requirement and begin pricing out the synergies obtained by downsizing personnel and equipment. But on the bright side there will be a complete Compliance checkup as part of the Freddy Kruegar cutting. Don’t think Symantec will protect you from Dokken.

But enough of the scary Halloween stories. Did activist investors have something to do with the Sony hack? When we look at the Q3 2014 Third Point Investor Letter on page 9 we find this bit of information (****emphasis mine****)

 

In May of 2013, Third Point announced a significant stake in Sony and suggested to the company’s CEO, Kazuo Hirai, that he should seriously consider spinning out 15‐20% of the company’s undervalued, American‐based Entertainment business. At the time, we explained that partially listing the Entertainment segment would have three positive effects: 1) highlighting its profitability; 2) increasing investor transparency, thereby allowing the market to properly benchmark the company against its global media peers; and ****3) incentivizing Entertainment’s management to run the company more efficiently by engaging in cost cutting and laying out clear earnings targets****

While, regrettably, the Company rejected our partial spin‐out suggestion, they made some changes that were consistent with our goals. ****In the Entertainment business in particular, Sony has cut costs, improved its dialogue with investors, and undertaken key management changes. **** In Electronics, Mr. Hirai’s team deserves credit for transitioning away from personal computers this year and improving television profitability in 2015. They have also improved investor transparency. Still, they have a long way to go and we continue to believe that more urgency will be necessary to definitively turn around the company’s fortunes.

A key tenet for us in making constructivist investments is our margin of safety. While we are most focused on the potential upside available to shareholders if management undertakes changes, we are unlikely to make a significant investment in a situation where constructivist‐driven change is the chief catalyst unless we see minimal downside. Sony was exactly the type of investment where the risk/reward ratio was skewed in our favor. Thanks to this investment principle, despite enduring profit warnings nearly every quarter we were invested, incurring worse news about Electronics than we expected, and suffering from market disappointment at the pace of Japanese macroeconomic reforms, we still managed to generate nearly a 20% return on this investment before exiting.

By the way Third Point is the No. 3 most well-known activist firm according to the 2014 Activist Investing Annual Review.

If we read into the report we can see that Third Point wanted Spin off its entertainment division. Sony didn’t go along with the plan. They did engage in cost cutting, but not to the level that Third Point wanted. Still, they exited with a 20% gain. Now let’s step back and drink a dose of reality. We have heard terms such as clueless or incompetent used to describe the security program at Sony. There may have been some of that, but in reality they had an activist investor who was pressuring them into some serious cost cutting. We also have to stop and consider that management isn’t clueless either. They know exactly what they are being told to accomplish. Are the activists clueless MBA’s who just “don’t get it” when it comes to Infosec? That’s an irrelevant question because they make a ton of money doing what they do. They don’t need to get Infosec at all. We won’t know how much Sony Entertainment’s Infosec program was cut, but don’t expect a well funded Infosec program or any program if you have an activist in house. Based on Third Point’s opinion they didn’t cut their overall budget enough. I would have to agree with Third Point that management has a long way to go to make Sony an efficiently run shop.

 Where are all the Infosec Activists?

If there are activist investors who attempt to stamp out child labor in shoe factories, or prevent the dumping of waste into rivers then where are the activist investors who buy companies and make them spend more money on Infosec? Children working in sweatshops and oil covered birds are things that matter to the public. Data breaches, not so much.  As an industry Infosec is still struggling to quantify what the ROI is on all those headcounts and equipment. In order for an Infosec activist fund manager to make change they would need to increase spending before a breach and demonstrate to the rest of the shareholders that was a good idea with real numbers.

One thing Wall Street has figured out is that nothing bad will happen if you don’t spend money on a JPMorgan sized Infosec program. While it’s likely every Infosec Professional’s fantasy to force management to spend money on a better security program it’s nothing but a fantasy out of touch with the financial reality of our world. There’s no money in spending on security, the preventative benefits are dubious at best, and consumers just don’t care. There’s a lot of money in cutting expenses and carving companies up like a roast. The hackers may not get you, but the activists will. Better call Dokken.

The Coming Financial Insurance Infosec Polar Vortex Storm Cloud

Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) is such an amazing tool for communicating and sharing ideas.   @Wh1t3Rabbit   @_sw17ch and I had some discussions regarding a topic that I have been discussing with @chriscarpinello for some time.  The great topic of Cyberinsurance!  The most recent article to kick off a lively discussion was published by ZDNet: Police can’t stop cybercriminals, but maybe insurers can.  Which led to some great commentary by @_sw17ch at Misguided Security and @DIFR_Janitor at CyberGuardians had some great commentary about the content of the article and where it’s going.

The general consensus from the infosec crowd is that this is going the wrong way if government is powerless to fight cybercrime, but insurers (part of the financial industry) can. This is absolutely no surprise to me at all. @alessiorastani told us this fact in 2011 when he went on BBC and said “Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

Now that we know who is really in charge that should tell everyone to put down the Metasploit, and become Bankers.

I have been saying for a long time that the future of Infosec is in insurance. There have been many events in the past year where large companies experience an incident and the brunt of the impact is taken away by insurance. If JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) can’t stop bad things from happening with 1000 people and an operating budget of $250M, what chance does a small business have?

@schunk says it well here

That is a great point as @scmunk goes on to say insurance has been around longer so people understand it more. How many people have elderly relatives who don’t know how to operate the DVR (or VCR when they had one)? For infosec professionals this stuff is very simple, but we all have to consider that we are from different backgrounds. We are the DVR stuck on repeat while the people around us are more concerned with how to operate the remote than watch what’s on the screen! This is a lot like patent law. The obviousness test is dependent on who is looking at the subject.

At the end of the day everybody’s job is help their business remain profitable. That goes for commercial and not-for-profit entities. The first objective everyone should have is to defend the balance sheet and income statement. When Something Bad Happens (TM), insurance is a tool that can help you with with your defense.

Let’s look at an incident, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a lawsuit for food poisoning, a factory burning down, or a group of APT Hackers. This is just like day trading stock. You don’t need to know what the company does, its financial situation, or its outlook for the future. There is some set of information that lets you move on to the next step without consideration for what else is happening.

You have some probability that something will happen and the cost of when it does. Sound anything like your CISSP exam? Let’s focus on the cost. When something breaks you have to pay to fix it. This adds to your Operating Expenses on the Income Statement, resulting in lower Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT).  Insurance covers your out of pocket expenses and restores those assets. Yes, but it doesn’t replace lost revenue you say? It can if you buy the right product. You can get additions to your business continuity policy that not only replace your factory, but also will pay you revenue based on your last quarter’s earnings until your factory is rebuilt.  It’s like the Servco slogan, as if it never happened.

If we take a high level view of All The Bad Things That Could Happen(TM), management will first be concerned with what happens to the Income Statement and Balance Sheet. There will be lots of insurance policies for different events in place. Do we need to get caught up in the details of the probability of a forest fire this year or the odds of “Peggy” having a side job at USA Prime Credit stealing your data? Not really. Someone else is going to pay. All you need to do is make sure all of the policies cover every possible scenario. Then you can go spend money on those fancy Palo Alto (NYSE: PANW) NGFWs and some FireEye (NASDAQ: FEYE) to keep “Peggy” out.

That’s assuming that you ever get to spend money on….those wonderful toys. Remember how we discussed EBIT earlier? There’s another reason that is important. Most companies have debt. One thing that is important to the investors is the Debt-to-EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization) ratio.  In simple terms this is expressed as your debt divided by the sum of the last four quarters EBITDA, evaluated on a quarterly basis. The desired ratio varies but usually anything over 4 is bad. In some cases if your Debt/EBITDA ratio exceeds a certain number you are considered in default which is bad. Even though everything at the company appears normal, your investors will consider exceeding the ratio spelled out in the Covenants the same as skipping out on the loan entirely.  The entire balance comes due at once, credit ratings drop because you skipped out on the loan and continue not to pay the full balance, the CFO gets fired for letting it happen, and people get laid off. The other complication with Covenants is that your investors can dictate what you spend your money on by limiting your CapEx and OpEx expenditures. They may not see the value in those Palo Alto firewalls or something to keep Peggy in line. If you thought arguing your case with the C-Suite was hard, just try talking to some investors representatives that are interested in making sure you keep your Debt/EBITDA low by controlling CapEx and OpEx, so they have assurance you’ll have enough money to keep paying them back. Their only risk is credit risk and you answer to them first. Your operational risks are not their concern. Besides, they bought insurance on the loans in case you go out of business so they can get their loan principal back.

Now let’s look at the effect on EBIT.  If you spend $250M on security equipment and 1000 people, you could still have a cyberincident which means you’re paying out in investigative fees, regulatory penalties, notification letters, etc.  Spending that $250M increased your operating expenses, thereby reducing your EBIT, potentially getting you into trouble with your investors.  Now you have an incident, which drives up expenses even more, reducing your EBIT, which gets you into trouble with your investors. What we learned from the JPM breach is that even if you spend that kind of money, something will happen eventually, whether it’s Peggy or a forest fire. If you’re really short on cash, buy breach notification insurance. Having that can make or break o small business or non-profit.  Buy a mid-size insurance policy for more protection. You might be like Target and have most of your cyber incident covered. Buy a huge policy that covers everything including replacement of revenue and it will be as if it never happened. Then you can balance the CapEx cost of security equipment and the OpEx cost of people to operate that equipment vs. any savings in insurance premium you get for having a security program. Juggling this is all can do if you’re a small business. Even if you’re a large business it might pay off to cut your security expenditures a bit and increase your insurance coverage.

Where do we take it from here? If you read into what I have written there are many learning and career opportunities here that will add to your marketability or you may decided, as I have, to move on to something other than technology based infosec. Here are some quick takeaways.

Learn to speak the language of the CFO and their team. My Finance I professor said, personal finance and corporate finance are exactly the same. The only difference is the number of 0’s. You can put the same concepts to use in your personal life in addition to work.

Take a free online course in Management Accounting. That’s not Quickbooks. It’s using accounting information and relating it to business decisions. If Bob sells a burger meal for $10 and his cost is $9, and he needs to sell 300 meals a day should he run a 5% off coupon? No because if he has trouble selling 300 meals, he’s going have even bigger problems selling 600 to make the same money for a measly .50 off. Think of how demanding discounts from your suppliers or purchasing alternative equipment affects the financial outcome of what you do (EBIT). Your CFO will thank you.

Take some free courses in LEAN or go for a LEAN Six-Sigma Black Belt. If you have Covenants that restrict your spending, the best way to remedy that is to help cut costs, reengineer processes, eliminate waste.  Convince your CFO to let your department keep a portion of the savings you “find” (in other people’s departments of course).  At the very least improving EBIT reduces your credit risk, and improves the company’s general survival rate.  At best you end up with more budget. In all cases, if you’re known as “the cutter” to the finance department, you’re not likely to end up on the layoff list when things do go south.

Talk to your corporate Treasurer. Treasury manages daily cash flows. When Bad Things Happen(TM) Treasury has compensate for expenses such as those PCI auditors who are going to give you a beating. Treasury also usually handles all of the company’s insurance policies since that protects the cash they manage from Bad Things (TM).  That Management Accounting class you took will come in handy when both of you sit down and play with the variables on the insurance company’s questionnaire. Do we buy that control? How much of a premium discount do we get? Nope, we spend more on the control than we get back on the premium.

Consider taking your state’s insurance licensing exam. In my state Errors & Omissions (aka E&O or Professional Liability) is covered by the Property & Casualty License. Cyberinsurance, business continuity, and injury should be part of this license. If you’re at a small or medium sized company more than likely you’ll be the only one who knows this topic inside and out. Your Compliance Department’s Conflict of Interest (COI) policy might prohibit you from selling to your company, but you will get experience with the language by selling to other companies as a side hustle. You’ll be an asset by learning to read the fine print and pointing out where your agent/broker left loopholes in the coverage. If you take on the insurance role at your company, guess what? You’re now performing a Treasury role and you’re a Financial Professional! After a few years of handling insurance you can take the Certified Treasury Professional exam. How many people have a CISSP, CTP, and an insurance license? That’s exclusivity you can charge extra for! There are also a lot of great nonprofits out there that could use an insurance agent/broker who will give up a little in commission to help them get a good deal on a policy.

Talk to Compliance and Legal to find the minimum spend on regulatory and legislative matters so your organization doesn’t appear negligent. Assisting with the paralegal research will help you understand all the different regulations, the associated penalties, and the highlights of cases such as FTC v. EVERYBODY. This builds on your Management Accounting class. Work with Treasury to come up with a properly sized policy for regulatory fines (yes there is a policy specifically for that), and balancing the outcome to arrive at EBIT your CFO will appreciate.  Who knows, after hanging out with Compliance for a while you might pick up an interest in what we do outside of infosec, such as Anti-Bribery Anti-Corruption (ABAC), Child Labor, Ethics, Sustainability, and Conflict Minerals. Truth be told, those things are why I switched to Compliance because they mess up our world and who we are more than Peggy ever could.  You can find more about becoming a Compliance & Ethics Professional here.

Keep an open mind in your journey. As we learned early in our technical careers, you use the right tool for the job. We also learned when we were young, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Information Security doesn’t have to be accomplished with IT Security because Peggy is using a computer to hack you. We can use many different skills and resources to make it as if Peggy never happened.

Refusing To Hire Black Hats May Be Risky And Costly

The topic of hiring reformed Black Hats continues to be a matter of debate.  Some believe that ‘You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not willing to hire a hacker’ while others believe such an idea is preposterous because it is not possible to reform any person who has been convicted.  Others may believe it simply doesn’t look good to hire convicted felons and dismiss the thought.  Unfortunately it isn’t possible to do that in the US and the continuing attitude toward convicted felons must change.

On April 25, 2012 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released new enforcement guidance regarding the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records In Employment Decisions.  In summary the enforcement guidance prohibits blanket policies that prohibit hiring convicted felons.    Security professionals should speak to HR, Legal, and other stakeholders to determine the proper processes for applicants.  If two candidates with similar qualifications apply, an employer can not simply choose to not hire the felon.

Employers must now take a variety of factors into consideration such as age at time of conviction, employment history, number of offenses for which there is a conviction, rehabilitation efforts, and other criteria.  This creates a layer of complexity in screening applicants. Businesses are starting to reconsider the importance, and more importantly, the liability associated with pre-employment background screening.  Risk averse organizations may choose to forego criminal background screening since one defense against a discrimination claim is that the applicant’s background was never checked.  The risk of an applicant alleging discrimination is also why many legal and compliance professionals recommend against social media reviews.  If you do not know an applicant’s religious or other affiliation, it is easier to defend against a discrimination claim.

One aspect to consider is whether or not the candidate is a good fit for the organization.  Personality and demonstrable skills are becoming more important than degrees and other factors.  Should we consider arrest and conviction history among those other factors?  Security professionals are conditioned to believe that everyone must be squeaky clean.  In terms of stakeholder management this attitude does not always bring shareholder value and may be at odds with the strategic direction of the business.

The organization’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy or Compliance & Ethics Program may require that the organization hire convicted felons as a means of helping them rejoin society.  Such policies can also help reduce recidivism.  The CFO may also become involved in the discussion as well.  The US Department Of Labor  Work Opportunity Tax Credit can save the company $1600-$9600 depending on the employee hired.  Maximizing tax efficiency is one thing that finance and accounting professionals do.  There can be a financial case for hiring convicted felons, especially in the information security discipline.

The topic of hiring reformed Black Hats is controversial, but when the complex legal requirements are considered the possibility of government sanctions make the idea of hiring Black Hats worth considering.  Information Security professionals can take part in the strategic direction of an organization by working with HR, Compliance & Ethics, and Finance to enhance the organization’s overall goals.  We have attempted to end discrimination based on a person’s skin color.  The color of the hat they wear is something we should also add to the list.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a white cat or a black, I think; a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” — Comrade Deng Xiaoping