This article pointed out the recent diagnosis of President Alvaro Uribe, of Colombia, with swine flu. Even worse, the leaders of Colombia have alerted the other leaders that were involved in a regional South American summit last week. While President Uribe is not considered high risk for death from the disease, this is a new turn in the pandemic and public awareness. To date, Colombia has reported 621 cases with 34 deaths, making the mortality rate .05%.

Meanwhile, in the US and UK, school has just resumed and health officials are closely monitoring schools. Plans for handling outbreaks in the schools vary by district, but several are known to be testing plans for tele-education and remote teaching.

Once again, organizations are urged to undertake some form of pandemic planning and testing, as a “just in case” measure for H1N1 and the possibility of a strong flu season this year. SANS has just launched a site dedicated to pandemic planning and news. Check it out for more information, or give us a call and arrange a time to chat.

I was astounded when I read this article that includes a 2 BILLION estimate on the number of H1N1 cases that the WHO is expecting. Even worse, at 30% of human population on the planet, many are calling that number conservative. Some members of the medical community say that 45-50% may be likely!

In either case, the good news is that SOME vaccine is likely to be available to those in the Northern Hemisphere before Autumn arrives. The bad news is that there will likely not be an abundance of it, and that means some will not have access.

This is where the DR/BC planning comes in. By now, you probably have heard a little bit about pandemic planning and hopefully have created processes for remote working, containing illness and ensuring that you can operate with reduced staff. If you haven’t done this yet, NOW IS THE TIME to get this started.

If you do already have a plan, now might be a good time to do some rudimentary testing. Maybe declare a couple of reduced staff days, test the load on the VPN and remote access servers and such. This testing effort will likely reveal a few holes in these plans, but it is much better to learn about them and mitigate them now than when the real thing is going on.

Clearly, from the evidence presented by the WHO, this is something we should be paying attention to. Those who lack the focus or resources to take it seriously may well find themselves in troubling times when the weather turns colder and folks in the office begin to sneeze….

Here is a recent lesson from one of our new Reputational Risk Audits that we have begun performing. The client, a financial services company, hired us to check out how their brand was being used online. They were very interested in possible risks that extend from the use of their brand and their online reputation.

We offer this service in three levels of research focus:

1. Basic web research and profiling only.

2. Inclusion of blogs and social networks.

3. Inclusion of peer to peer networks for leaking documents, pirated code, etc.

Our services look at many facets of online reputation and many mechanisms that DLP tools and the like might miss.

In this particular case, the client wanted us to focus in on the 1st and 2nd levels of our service. After a couple of weeks, we met to present our findings. There were several. I am at liberty to share one, in particular, with the public.

The client had a customer service person, we will call Sheila. Sheila had been with their organization for a little over 5 years and was considered to be a senior level customer service representative. She was very helpful and had great rapport with their customers. Unfortunately, Sheila had also recently discovered social networks and took it upon herself to create a customer support profile on a well known social media network. Her profile was linked to the brand and site of our client financial services company. Sheila did what she thought was an admirable thing and established the profile as an interface (albeit unsanctioned) for working with her customers.

Sheila was trying to do the right thing. She really wanted to use social media to talk to her customers, help them resolve their problems and truly help progress the image of the company she worked for. There were just a few issues with this approach:

1. She was asking customers confidential questions and receiving their information on a public service. This exposed the personal information of the customers to search engines, attackers and other online crimes.

2. She failed to obtain permission to use the brand of the organization she worked for and in doing so, caused harm to her customers AND the very company she was trying to help.

There are other issues as well, but these are the primary ones. Needless to say, our client was not thrilled when we detailed this for them. Talks with Sheila ensued and much discussion with attorneys, HR, regulators and eventually the customers were required. In the end, Sheila kept her position and while her management applauded her initiative and attention to the customers, she was sharply rebuked for causing the disclosures. Many customers were also furious as they were notified of the issue.

The moral of the story is that reputational risk is real. How your brand, online presence and service organization presents itself online has a huge impact on your customers, reputation and bottom line. Have you checked out your security policies around blogs, social media and/or online brand use? Have you sifted through the Internet to see what your organization looks like to the public, your customers and your employees? If you want to discuss reputational risk and how to help manage it, give us a call. We would be happy to talk you through some of the ways that you can tackle this growing issue. In the meantime, have a talk with your employees, especially customer service folks. Help them to understand that while they may want to “go the extra mile” to help their customers, they have to remain well within the boundaries of security and safe interaction. Sheila was trying to do the right thing, just like the folks on your team!