Sunday, February 23, 2014

Security alert fail

News flash to IT security professionals: If you are depending on an alert system that generates 10,700 messages a day that require manual processing to determine if any are fraudulent or not, your alert system is not working.

This article says that this is exactly what happened at Neiman Marcus while credit card data was being stolen. The investigators reported that the 60,000 alarms over the three and a half months of the attack were not noticed because they represented about one percent of the total number of alarms (which I extrapolated into 10,700 alarms per day).

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Alternate suggestion for federal minimum wage increase

An open message to Senator Sherrod Brown, representing the great state of Ohio:

I have a suggestion for minimum wage legislation. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour with the new desired minimum being $10.10 per hour. My suggestion is a law that limits executive compensation for each executive to $1,000,000 per year unless the company's lowest paid employee is paid at least $10.10 per hour x 30 hours per week x 52 weeks per year (or $15,756). This gives companies a choice: Limit executive compensation and pay the current minimum wage or provide employees with the new minimum wage and executive compensation is unlimited as it is today.

I could see using a multiplier. $1,000,000 / $15,756 is 63.47 so executive pay could be limited to 63.47 times the lowest paid employee's annual pay. Note that my suggested new law would automatically exclude small businesses from the higher minimum wage because they only dream of paying their top executives $1 million per year.

If you like this idea, feel free to take it and run with it. I don't need any credit for it.