[00:00:04]2007年黑暗版历年阅读真题解析第四篇
[00:00:05]沪江考研
[00:00:30]by：daisy8475

[00:00.55]It never rains but is pours.
[00:02.61]Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles,
[00:09.30]and improved their feeble corporation governance,
[00:12.87]a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—
[00:17.64]the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity.
[00:26.72]Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right,
[00:32.09]and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking,
[00:37.22]telecoms and air travel,
[00:39.87]information protection is now high on the boss's agenda in businesses of every variety.
[00:46.27]Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—
[00:51.82]from organizations as diverse as Time Warner,
[00:56.24]the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California,
[01:04.49]Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems
[01:10.66]and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities.
[01:15.65]“Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset,”
[01:23.64]says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University’s business School,
[01:28.67]“The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value,
[01:33.54]which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders”.
[01:37.68]Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP),
[01:45.26]perhaps it is time for GASP,
[01:49.49]Generally Accepted Security Practices,
[01:52.86]suggested Eli Noam of New York’s Columbia Business School.
[01:57.05]“Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue,
[02:06.35]not a technical one,” he says.
[02:09.30]The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss.
[02:14.71]Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust,
[02:21.09]that most valuable of economic assets,
[02:23.95]is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—
[02:28.07]and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands.
[02:38.08]The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—
[02:42.35]though not justified—
[02:44.04]by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage.
[02:49.87]Until California recently passed a law,
[02:53.39]American firms did not have to tell anyone,
[02:56.52]even the victim, when data went astray.
[02:59.89]That may change fast:
[03:01.71]lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.
[03:08.36]Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America,
[03:14.94]disclosed on June 17th,
[03:18.27]overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
[03:26.60]that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.