Jim Haney hopes to protect his company from the next big Internet virus attack, but he’s not sure he can. “We’ve been lucky so far,” says Whirlpool’s chief security officer, “but our time is probably coming.” When Sobig swept the Net last month, Haney’s $11-billion-a-year company was able to emerge from the worst Internet virus ever pretty much unscathed. Whirlpool’s centralized approach to managing its 20,000 PCs and 800 servers worldwide enabled Haney and his staff to quickly isolate areas that were hit. Yet he knows that for every safeguard he puts in, hackers are hatching a dozen ways around it. It’s their speed vs. Whirlpool’s size, and he’s worried. After Sobig he ramped up the installation of sophisticated software from IBM that automatically keeps all of Whirlpool’s machines updated with the latest security protections. Getting the system running isn’t simple, in part because many of Whirlpool’s techies, who like doing one-on-one support of desktops, don’t want it. But Haney has no time to argue. Like just about every big company in the world, Whirlpool has become hugely dependent on the Internet. About 95% of the company’s sales pass through it in one way or another. That means outages are simply no longer acceptable. Full Story
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