THE "Conclusion" part of the report (a document we'll publish tomorrow as PDF) is included at the bottom of this post. Worry not, it's not the end of the series, only the end of this report; we have plenty left to show and to explain after that. We're eager to show to the world what Sirius ‘Open Source’ Inc./Limited/Corporation truly is.
"We're eager to show to the world what Sirius ‘Open Source’ Inc./Limited/Corporation truly is."As a teaser of sorts, consider how poorly the company was handling data and information. It was getting worse over time because skilled people were leaving the company, making way for the "Google is your friend" mantra. This aforementioned mantra was something along the lines of, "trust big companies", you can give them any data we have. Trust them, they're big! Sure, they also spy for a government.
Data of high-profile clients, both past and present, was naturally left scattered all over the place, sometimes even outside the country. And to give just one example (there are so many; some will be covered later this month and next month), colleagues have cognition reports and incremental/full load reports on local -- as in personal and offsite -- machines (this is indirectly related to patients' data) with no protocol or guidelines for removing these. There's potentially sensitive data on people's machines at home and we've already witnessed mistakes made by the clients themselves (like patients' names or similar data showing up by mistake/accident).
THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!
"There are serious ramifications for data protection and adherence to law..."In a saner world, everything would be uploaded to a firewalled file server located on the client's own network, accessible in some secure fashion, without the data ever leaving the network, not even metadata. But when a company like Sirius handles its E-mail via AWS and AWS is also the host of OTRS (ticketing), one is expected to just upload files to AWS and transmit the stuff over E-mail (i.e. open relays). No encryption. I was repeatedly told off for using PGP in my E-mails.
There are serious ramifications for data protection and adherence to law, as there are unpatched old machines and perhaps backups that contain such files -- a ticking time bomb. And even way after they're no longer a client (years later), the example above serves to show that the problem does not go away. Not even when the contract ends (or gets terminated).
"Clients simply come to assume the reputation earned in past decades persists to date."The sad reality is that the company, Sirius (so-called 'open source'), is terrified about clients finding out how reckless and incompetent the company gradually became. Clients simply come to assume the reputation earned in past decades persists to date. They're trusting a company run by a person divorced twice, whose kids refuse to even speak to him. How can deep trust be established with people who (if they get caught) simply pretend nothing bad happened and instead of apologising would rather get aggressive, even combative, to cover up the abuse?
The text below mentions ISO, security incidents, and then the company's attempts to shoot the messenger (who cautioned about those issues along with many other issues). The in-depth analysis of the witch-hunt will follow after this report is published in full (some time tomorrow).