M3AAWG releases Operation Safety-Net, Best Practices for government, business and industry outlining the online threats with the proven practices to mitigate them

If you follow the efforts of the team at Hedgehog Hosting, you know that through our relationship with the i2Coalition, we are actively engaged with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group.  This group meets three times a year not only to discuss abuse issues that plague our industry but to actually establish real working groups and committees that come up with concrete ways  to mitigate issues such as spam, malware, phishing, hacking and other related hazards.

For the past two years, Richard Feller has represented Hedgehog as a member of the team that comprises M3AAWG's Hosting Committee.  As a member of this Committee, Hedgehog has been on the front line of the discussions and the possible remediations of these threats.  To that end, we have come up with our final draft of a Best Practice document called Operation Safety-Net.  This document focuses on five main areas and their related best practices.

1.    Malware and Botnets
2.    Phishing and Social Engineering
3.    Internet Protocol and Domain Name System (DNS) Exploits
4.    Mobile, Voice over IP (VoIP) and Telephony Threats
5.    Hosting and Cloud Threats

Operation Saftey-Net doesn’t just describe today’s threats.  It provides straightforward, recommended best practices for governments, businesses, educators and other members of the Internet and mobile industry to join in the fight against these threats. The report is a synopsis of the current risk environment and was a truely global collaborative effort from the industry partners that fight spam, malware, phishing, hacking and related hazards.

M3AAWG Chairman Michael Adkins said, “Operation Safety-Net isn’t just for network or operational professionals.  It aggregates the anti-abuse industry’s global experience in identifying and curtailing current threats to help non-technical executives understand and manage online risk in their organizations.”   To that end we are pleased to share this document with our clients and collegues and we encourage everyone to review it while looking at their own internal networks.

Hedgehog Hosting is pleased to have been a major contributor to the Hosting and Cloud Threats section as well as a contributor to the many of the other sections that involve the infrastructure threats in general.  Operation Safety-Net has been officially posted on the M3AAWG website and can be found at:

https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/M3AAWG_LAP-79652_IC_Operation-Safety-Net_2-BPs2015-06.pdf

Do we make the right decisions about how we run our companies

I recently read a story that led me to ponder the varying ways that we look at companies and the services they provide.  The particular story I read was about a Southwest Airlines flight that allowed one of their planes to return to the jetway after initiating its departure to let a woman off the plane who had just been notified that her son had been in a major accident. Southwest pilots returned to the gate where the woman was led to a private room and then even redirected onto a different flight to where her injured son was in the hospital.

The social media praises came pouring in.  And as I read these praises, I could not help but remember a previous story about Southwest.  In this story there was a different flight that was in the news for NOT letting a woman off a plane when she had been notified by her husband, before take-off, that her son had just called his father saying that he was contemplating suicide. This mother later found out that her son did in fact commit suicide.

These are obviously abbreviated stories and one is very uplifting and the other is very sad.  As I look at this from the perspective of a business owner rather than a father or a business traveller, it illustrates what I have always felt and that is that businesses aren't their policies and procedures, but rather their people.  The biggest difference in these two stories are the people that reacted.

In speaking with a close friend the other night, I was wondering if we, as business owners, make the right decisions about how we run our companies and what we feel is important to our clients. My business partners and I have always wanted Hedgehog Hosting to be that company that is not just our policies and our procedures, which are very important, but more importantly is "US".

In an industry where it is common to focus more resources on the systems rather than the people that maintain and operate those systems,  Hedgehog strives to be that company.  No matter who you work for or what your company's policies and procedures are, there's always a human response that sometimes makes more sense.

I will always be thankful for the people who make the right decisions and strive to make their companies better for it.