By: Derek Bortals
Luna Colony - In the week after the first major data breach of a megacorp in years, both Genetectic and NSI are feeling the backlash.
Dr. Alice Winters, Director of Hospitals for Genetectic Corporation announced the breach last week over ONN, stating that patient information had been exposed. In the week since, Genetectic stock price has slipped 7%, and the New Geneva Office of Privacy Protections has requested the megacorp re-certify their physical and virtual security in order to continue storing their sensitive data.
This is the first major setback for the biotech and healthcare megacorp in the past two years of nearly heroic performance including developing advanced new medications and quashing multiple disease outbreaks.
Ian Morehead, VP of Enterprise Network Security for NSI believes that Genetectic’s refusal to allow flatliner ICE to defend their network had a hand in the success of the breach. Flatliner ICE are cyberdefense programs that utilize a counterattack that overloads a hacker’s Interlink, causing them to flatline. While most Netrunner chairs have defibrilators to prevent actual death, inexperienced hackers using weak equipment have been killed.
“She called us right in the bloody middle of things and told us not to deploy. Like what the fuck was I supposed to do lady? They fucked the Blackguard so fast, the next best chance to stop them would have been deploying Flatliners. But she wouldn’t have it. She just said to overwhelm them. And sure, seeing petabytes of ICE coming at you is enough to make you run, but we could have caught them using the lethal tech. They didn’t come to play patty cake, and they made the fuck sure we knew it.”
NSI’s stock price dipped 10% in the wake of the breach, the slide stopped by the announcement of upgrades to the BlackGuard security system, and the opening and active recruitment of several positions in research and development.
Reports filed with New Geneva for the recertification process describe the attack as carefully coordinated and professionally executed. A combination of physical breach and using the corporation’s servers to locate the sensitive data. However, the contact was extremely brief, and the report states that due to RAID data distribution, no complete directories of data were accessed, but partials of several directories were collected.
Genetectic now must undergo a long recertification process with auditors from New Geneva investigating employees, facilities and and policies to ensure that Genetectic is, in fact, meeting or exceeding the standards for a healthcare corporation’s security and protection of sensitive personal data.
Genetectic responded to our request with the following statement, “We are, of course dismayed at this action, and continue to cooperate with all authorities to restore normal data operations as quickly as possible. We will, of course, be funding personal identity and security packages for anyone threatened by this breach, and look forward to the recertification process proving that this was an outlying event rather than a truly systemic issue. We continue to improve and advance our own technologies, and seek to work with partners who do the same. Genetectic has opened bidding for security companies, both physical and cyber, to submit contract proposals.”
Rumor in the corporate sphere is that Matsumoto and KO Tech have expressed interest in Genetectic’s request for bids.
