The Dao of Strategic Assessment (34): A View from a Saturday Morning Quarterback

We are so globally connected that a cyber disruption can only slow down the momentum of a web-based commerce.

Are you strategically prepared to manage your business when your computerized information systems or one of your primary web communication tools is inoperable?

Assess your settings in terms of your operations. Ask yourself the following questions, "What will my operating costs be if this device is down? ... What is my backup? ... What is the impact regarding to my relationships to my customers"

Conclusively. spend some time with your IT professional and review your contingency plans. One should never be overly depended on one specific technology.


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August 8, 2009
Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter
By JENNA WORTHAM and ANDREW E. KRAMER

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

The blogger, a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia, writes under the name Cyxymu, but identified himself only by the name Giorgi in a telephone interview. Giorgi, who said he taught at Sukhumi State University, first noticed Thursday afternoon that LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, was not working for him. “I decided to go to Facebook,” he said. “And Facebook didn’t work. Then I went to Twitter, and Twitter didn’t work. ‘How strange,’ I thought, ‘What a coincidence they all don’t work at once.’ ”

Security experts say that it is nearly impossible to determine who exactly is behind the attack, which disrupted access to Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and some Google sites on Thursday and continued to affect many Twitter users into Friday evening.

But Beth Jones, an analyst with the Internet security firm Sophos, said the assault occurred in two stages.

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a “joe job,” is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. “These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails,” said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi’s accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu’s pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

Giorgi said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. “It was nostalgia,” he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

“I feel a bit ashamed for the people who lost service because my blog was blocked,” said Giorgi.

The hundreds of millions of Internet users affected were simply “collateral damage,” said Ms. Jones.

The attacks and their aftermath show just how vital Web tools and services are becoming to political discourse — and how vulnerable they are to disruption.

“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The attacks that felled Twitter shed light on the fragility of the popular microblogging service, especially compared to its competitor Facebook, which quickly recovered from the pummeling, said Stefan Tanase, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security firm. Twitter, a small San Francisco company, has been struggling to improve its security even as it tries to manage hypergrowth in the number of users and messages it handles.

But, Mr. Tanase said, “Twitter is definitely a company that is learning fast and reacting fast.”

The outage frustrated many Twitter users. Some migrated over to better-functioning social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed to send messages and follow conversations, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research and a prolific tweeter.

“If Twitter goes down or shuts down permanently, the conversation just shifts somewhere else,” he said.

For others, solving the problem wasn’t quite as simple.

Soren Macbeth, founder and chief executive of StockTwits, a service that lets investors trade news and information about companies, said his service, which is built on Twitter’s infrastructure, was offline Thursday and still hadn’t fully recovered Friday.

“Having the service be intermittent is almost worse than having it be totally down,” he said. “It makes it seem more like our issue, a problem with our service.”

Mr. Macbeth said the service, which receives as many as 10,000 postings a day, had been at Twitter’s mercy since its inception. “It’s very challenging to run a business on top of Twitter,” he said. The difficulties of working with Twitter had already prompted StockTwits to begin developing a stand-alone platform, which the company plans to introduce on Sept. 1.

But for most businesses, Twitter is merely a supplemental marketing tool.

Ben Van Leeuwen, who runs trucks that serve scoops of ice cream to customers around New York City, said he didn’t even notice the service was down. “Sales were the same yesterday as they were the day before,” he said.

Aaron Magness, who heads up new business development and marketing at Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with a sizable following on Twitter, said in an e-mail message that the outage didn’t affect the company.

“Twitter is one of many communication tools we utilize,” he said. “Luckily, we love talking to our customers and Twitter going down doesn’t impact our phones."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/technology/internet/08twitter.html
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/twitter-apps-blocked-as-attacks-continue-friday/?hpw

The Dao of Strategic Assessment (33): Assessing the Client Profile

We live in an information society where the attention span of the masses is about five minutes or less. They want immediate feedback and then they go on. (Most of the time, this group do not want to focus on the grand picture. They live for the now moment with no regard for the future. That is another post.) ...

Twitter is the web medium for those attention-challenged, obsessively-compulsive individuals who need immediate information feedback.

Currently, customer-based businesses and celebrities utilize Twitter as their immediate connection to their many followers. To maintain their loyalty, one must recognize their supporter's profile by properly assessing their needs and wants.


Building the Psychological Profile
The first step of assessing the data is to gather the right data set. It must be based on the targeted social-economic group. The next step is identifying their behavior by determining their most common habits and inclinations under the criteria of delineated economic changes and the technical specifics of the market terrain. He/she then compares the data to other sources in order to have the most authentic data set. (As a safeguard, we usually implement another round of intelligence gathering from the ground level).

Proper strategic assessment of intelligence gives the reader a better under-standing of the followers in terms of predictability and direction

Connecting the follower's profile to the projected outcome enables the readers to understand how their fans connect to the greater picture.

Conclusively, our approach gives the client an objective outlook of their competitive positioning in their marketplace.


Cardinal Rule: The amount of quality intelligence is inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge one knows their marketplace.

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Martha Stewart: Twitter is Better than Facebook

Yesterday, Bill Gates admitted that he has abandoned Facebook because he had too many friend requests and could not tell who he knew and who he didn’t. Now we have another well-known public figure who isn’t very fond of Facebook: Martha Stewart

The master of home décor, in an interview with The Daily Beast, talks up Twitter and describes Facebook as “dippy.” Unlike Gates though, she extensively discusses why Twitter has a special place in her heart.

Here’s a little of what she to the Beast: “I just love it so much more than Facebook … First of all, you don’t have to spend any time on it, and, second of all, you reach a lot more people. And I don’t have to ‘befriend’ and do all that other dippy stuff that they do on Facebook.”

Martha continues to praise Twitter, even calling it “the Wal-Mart of the Internet” (that’s an interesting analogy…). She also stated that the Facebook v. Twitter debate doesn’t matter all that much, specifically because, “they’re all going to be owned by the same company eventually.” The Beast even got a quote from Brandee Barker, Facebook’s Director of Communications, on the subject of Martha Stewart and Facebook:

“I think Martha has built a tremendous fan base and she obviously knows how to use many different ways to communicate with them … I’m a big fan of Martha Stewart and her brand—and I hope she finds more ways to use Facebook.”

Really though, what else could Brandee say that didn’t bash Martha or Twitter?

Are Stewart’s words indicative of anything? While it’s humorous that she calls Twitter the Wal-Mart of the Internet (and that she thinks they’ll both be owned by the same company someday), she does bring up some interesting points about how people, especially celebrities, utilize Facebook and Twitter differently. She uses it to get answers to her questions fast, to host giveaways, and even to purposely rattle the cages and to make some buzz, when she asked if Bruno (the movie) was about decorating.

Can Facebook really accomplish these things, especially for a celebrity with a massive following? While it’s true that there’s a competition brewing between Facebook and Twitter, we seem to forget that they’re different products that have different purposes.

Facebook is about intimate connections and sharing multimedia with a group of friends. Twitter is about broadcasting and spreading your message to the entire world. With that in mind, which platform do you think celebrities require more? There’s a rational set of reasons that explain why celebrities have been cheerleaders for the microblogging startup.
Source: http://mashable.com #

The Dao of Strategic Assessment (32): Assess and Decide

Before a game-changing move is implemented, the chief decision-maker(s) must decide whether the intended outcome is greater than the secondary after-effects. Conclusively, the decision-maker must also determine whether he or she is willing to live with the consequences from such disruption.

Whenever you are making a high level decision, can you see the impact of your decision? Can you see how strategically positioned you and your company will be, after the implementation of your decision?

Do you have a strategic process that allows you to see the strategic positioning outcome of your decision?

If not, contact us at service[aatt]collaboration360[ddott]com.

Our Compass AE process will give you the strategic insights that enables you to maximize your profits, minimize your costs and mitigate your risks

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Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk
By JOHN MARKOFF and THOM SHANKER

It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government’s financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

“We knew we could pull it off — we had the tools,” said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

But the attack never got the green light. Bush administration officials worried that the effects would not be limited to Iraq but would instead create worldwide financial havoc, spreading across the Middle East to Europe and perhaps to the United States.

Fears of such collateral damage are at the heart of the debate as the Obama administration and its Pentagon leadership struggle to develop rules and tactics for carrying out attacks in cyberspace.

While the Bush administration seriously studied computer-network attacks, the Obama administration is the first to elevate cybersecurity — both defending American computer networks and attacking those of adversaries — to the level of a White House director, whose appointment is expected in coming weeks.

But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon’s new “cybercommand” acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns.

“We are deeply concerned about the second- and third-order effects of certain types of computer network operations, as well as about laws of war that require attacks be proportional to the threat,” said one senior officer.

This officer, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work, also acknowledged that these concerns had restrained the military from carrying out a number of proposed missions. “In some ways, we are self-deterred today because we really haven’t answered that yet in the world of cyber,” the officer said.

In interviews over recent weeks, a number of current and retired White House officials, Pentagon civilians and military officers disclosed details of classified missions — some only considered and some put into action — that illustrate why this issue is so difficult.

Although the digital attack on Iraq’s financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to cripple Iraq’s military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage.

Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq’s telephone networks. American officials also contacted international communications companies that provided satellite phone and cellphone coverage to Iraq to alert them to possible jamming and to ask their assistance in turning off certain channels.

Officials now acknowledge that the communications offensive temporarily disrupted telephone service in countries around Iraq that shared its cellphone and satellite telephone systems. That limited damage was deemed acceptable by the Bush administration.

Another such event took place in the late 1990s, according to a former military researcher. The American military attacked a Serbian telecommunications network and accidentally affected the Intelsat satellite communications system, whose service was hampered for several days.

These missions, which remain highly classified, are being scrutinized today as the Obama administration and the Pentagon move into new arenas of cyberoperations. Few details have been reported previously; mention of the proposal for a digital offensive against Iraq’s financial and banking systems appeared with little notice on Newsmax.com, a news Web site, in 2003.

The government concerns evoke those at the dawn of the nuclear era, when questions of military effectiveness, legality and morality were raised about radiation spreading to civilians far beyond any zone of combat.

“If you don’t know the consequences of a counterstrike against innocent third parties, it makes it very difficult to authorize one,” said James Lewis, a cyberwarfare specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.

“Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic” — conventional — “weapons,” said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement.”

Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that “cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive.”

That view is challenged by some legal and technical experts.

“It’s virtually certain that there will be unintended consequences,” said Herbert Lin, a senior scientist at the National Research Council and author of a recent report on offensive cyberwarfare. “If you don’t know what a computer you attack is doing, you could do something bad.”

Mark Seiden, a Silicon Valley computer security specialist who was a co-author of the National Research Council report, said, “The chances are very high that you will inevitably hit civilian targets — the worst-case scenario is taking out a hospital which is sharing a network with some other agency.”

And while such attacks are unlikely to leave smoking craters, electronic attacks on communications networks and data centers could have broader, life-threatening consequences where power grids and critical infrastructure like water treatment plants are increasingly controlled by computer networks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged.

Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman’s terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

“Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The U.N. Charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/politics/02cyber.html

The Way of Strategy (8): Preparation Precedes Performance

This best practice of "preparation precedes performance" process was successfully used by Paul Brown and Bill Walsh. The objective of this exercise is to mentally prepare the players for practice.

Beside emphasizing the fundamentals, the players understand their role and responsibilities for each play. This training practice also establishes discipline and makes the players accountable.

If the players can't learn in the climate controlled setting of a classroom, what makes people think that they can learn under the hot sun of Napa, California?

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Raiders two-a-days: Hitting books, not each other

David White, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, August 1, 2009

(07-31) 21:55 PDT -- Take the old school of two-a-day practices, add the new school of football teaching, and that explains all this standing around at Raiders training camp.

Raiders coach Tom Cable's first NFL training camp is like no other experienced by anyone on the 80-man roster, from rookie Darrius Heyward-Bey to 17-year veteran Lorenzo Neal.

Instead of doing what normal NFL teams do at training camp - strap up and hit somebody - the Raiders are spending the first four days of camp in an outdoor classroom.

No pads. No hitting. No plays run. No sweat broken. Just lots of teaching and, Cable hopes, lots of learning.

"It seemed like it was weird at first," linebacker Isaiah Ekejiuba said Friday. "But you go through it and it's a great concept."

This is Cable's big idea: Teach the players what they are supposed to do, down to the last detail, before cutting them loose to do it on the field. Injuries are limited, if only because it is near impossible to get hurt practicing at the speed of jog.

"It's a chance to really sort it out and work through it before all of a sudden you put the combative part into it," said Cable, who went through this before as a college coach. "Remember, the NFL season starts now and it hopefully ends sometime in February for you.

"The human body can only take so many car crashes."

A sampling of what is going on between water breaks behind the Napa Valley Marriott:

Beat the can: The defensive line goes against upturned garbage cans. Everyone gets in their assigned spot, then some of them go into motion to a different point of attack before the imagined snap.

Change that call: The quarterbacks line up in a corner to work on audibles. Quarterbacks coach Paul Hackett gives a defensive situation. The quarterbacks don't just call out an audible, but they bark it out side to side and make hand signals as if they were actually communicating to teammates.

# A deceptive protocol emphasized by Bill Walsh

Air ball: The passing offense faces the passing defense in seven on sevens. The receivers, tight ends and running backs run full routes in coverage, but the quarterback doesn't throw the ball. At one point, defensive coordinator John Marshall - as if out of habit - calls out, "It's time for a pick!"

Short run-through: The run game is choreographed in team noncontact drills. The ball is snapped and handed off to a running back, followed by an instant whistle. Coaches make sure everyone lined up right and went to the right spot. Offsides and false starts were an unusual occurrence, given the slo-mo circumstances.

Cable hopes this format allows them to get those mistakes out of their system before the physical stuff begins.

"This is unique because we don't have the stress, we don't get beat up, we're really learning and relearning," Cable said. "Right on pace."

E-mail David White at dwhite@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/01/SPH319286I.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-raiders-cablescamp&prov=ap&type=lgns

The Dao of Strategic Assessment (31): Assess and Predict

Based on some micro economic trends that we have noticed and some interesting insights from a few private experts, C360 believed that the influx of the Chinese investors will play a quiet but important role in resurrecting the economic state of California.

The Chinese investors currently have the influence of the Five Strategic Constructs. They will use it to their advantage

We will cover more on this topic in another post.


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Facetime July 30, 2009, 5:00PM EST
Is China Leading a Global Recovery?

By Maria Bartiromo
Increasingly, many companies see China as their ticket to surviving—and even thriving—in a post-recession world because of its insatiable appetite for goods as it moves toward a consumer-driven economy.

That theme keeps cropping up in recent conversations with CEOs and financial executives. Among the voices extolling the strength of China are Alcoa (AA) CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) CEO Richard Adkerson, CEO Donald Tang of Hong Kong-based investment bank Citic Securities, and Joe Meuse, president of financial consulting firm Belmont Partners.

As BusinessWeek went to press on July 29, such enthusiasm was tempered by a sell-off on the Shanghai market. Concern was widespread because, as The Wall Street Journal online reported: "...hopes of a world-wide economic recovery increasingly center on continued growth in the developing world, and China in particular."

Correction or no correction, China's growing global economic importance was underscored as a high-level delegation from Beijing began discussions in Washington on July 27. "We're actually in the same big boat that has been hit by a fierce wind and huge waves,"

Dai Bingguo, one of the Chinese dignitaries, was quoted as saying. But a wag might call the two days of meetings massage therapy for America's biggest creditor, and a lot of people are starting to believe America and China are in two very different boats.


MARIA BARTIROMO
Where are we right now in this global slowdown? Do things feel better?

KLAUS KLEINFELD/ALCOA
Oh, yes, absolutely better than, let's say, last December. Our industry was in a free fall, with a 60% price decline in five months. Now we see that China has come back and is starting to grow nicely again, pulling Asia with it. We even see signs of an uptick in the U.S.

Is China going to lead the global economy out of this slump?
I wouldn't think so. But [China is] a very strong force. Everybody in our industry thought that because China has such huge capacity, when the market came down it would flood the world with cheap metal. It didn't happen.

The Chinese actually curtailed more than 30% of their capacity. So they acted responsibly. And their stimulus program is clearly working. I'm very impressed with what the Chinese are doing.

When do you think China will make the transition from an export-led to a consumer-led economy? I think they are on the way now. The Chinese government is actively stimulating consumer activity. I mean, this year China will be the country that manufactures more cars than the U.S., more than anybody else on this planet.

MARIA BARTIROMO
You said in a phone conversation we had earlier that Beijing is transferring some $10 billion worth of state-owned stock to the social security fund. What's the significance of that?

DONALD TANG/CITIC
I think it represents the beginning of a wealth transfer from the government to its people. China's savings rate has been very high because its safety net is not as robust as that of many other countries such as the U.S. This is designed to boost the confidence of urban residents so they can start to spend and stimulate domestic consumption. It's a very important point as the country moves from an export-led economy to a consumer economy. China seems to be shaking off the slump more swiftly than the U.S. Do you see that happening?

Two months ago, I walked into a breakfast meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Beijing, and there was nobody else in the room.

On July 27, I walked in without a reservation and there was no room for me. So there are anecdotal signs that the economy is picking up.

Was China smarter than the U.S. about stimulating its economy?
Policymakers have really tried to take advantage of the crisis to transform the economy from an export economy led by the coastal region to [one led by] domestic consumption by, for example, giving consumers vouchers to buy electronic goods and reducing taxes to put money in their pockets.

MARIA BARTIROMO
In terms of growth, what are your most promising markets?

RICHARD ADKERSON/FREEPORT
China has been the support for the copper market during 2009, both through its infrastructure spending and the performance of its economy. China's stimulus plan is actually going better than expected, and we are seeing demand come back.

What will be the driving force in a global recovery? It's China.

MARIA BARTIROMO
You were in China two weeks ago. What is happening on the ground?

JOSEPH MEUSE/BELMONT PARTNERS
I'm telling you they're already past the recession. That economy is humming. I see at least 9% GDP growth.

Are the Chinese amazed that we're still stuck in recession?
That's right. They're holding all the cards and will continue to do so. There is a feeling here that China is still stuck in some kind of Third World mentality. It's not. It's a superpower. Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_32/b4142011635792.htm