During a merger, the plan seemed simple enough: a firewall between the parent company and the newly-acquired division would stay in place until the process completed.

As the day for turnover approached, problems arose when requested details did not come in from the outsourcer, but plenty of pictures, documents and diagrams did.

"I think this particular group adhered to the baffle-them-with-bull-stuff rule," our Off the Record author writes in Our security is secretly secure.

Eventually, our author asked for a "show tech" command to be run. "I knew we were in trouble when the people on the other end asked me to e-mail them the command so they could get the spelling correctly."

Three days later the outsourcer finally responded, insisting that it didn’t share that because it contained proprietary information.

"How can I possibly verify their proprietary configuration is indeed the rock solid policy they say it is without being able to actually examine it?"

Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 15, 2008 06:21 AM