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about Asia Buzz
Asia Buzz: You've Got Mail
Making a mistake in today's business world could cost you your business
By ERIC ELLIS
August
29, 2000
Web posted at 1:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 1:00 a.m. EDT
Think viruses are the worst things that can happen to an e-business? Think again. What about your Technology team? How well do you trust them? The nerd you hired -- indeed the one you promoted to the board because you read in Fast Company magazine how important techies had become in today's Internet Age -- may have thrilled you with his navigation of Windows and Word, but does he really know what he is doing?
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INTERACTIVE |
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Two separate incidents in cyberspace this past week underline just
how damaging -- and extremely embarrassing -- it can be operating at
technology's leading edge.
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- Friday,
August 11, 2000
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ASIAWEEK |
Intelligence
The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek
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The first incident concerned Singapore's rising telco, StarHub, the one designated to take on the domestic might of Singapore Telecom. Someone, and it's still not clear if they were from inside or outside the company, fashioned an offensive e-mail. And because this is tightly wound Singapore where many things are banned, it included links to pornography sites and attachments of nude photographs. Naughty.
The e-mail was dispatched via a group distribution list and arrived in the inboxes of thousands of Singaporeans who had signed up for StarHub services. StarHub management then issued desperate pleas to subscribers not to forward the offending e-mail.
The incident was unpleasant and embarrassing, and not just because of the content of the e-mail. It underlined how vulnerable StarHub's systems are to attack. The police have been called in, and a StarHub subscriber has been accused of involvement. That suggests someone outside StarHub may have hacked into the company's system and purloined distribution lists. And if they did that, surely they wouldn't have been so stupid as to do so using their own, easily traceable account.
What happened at London and New York-based Ecountries.com was also damaging. The site, which has been under development for the past six months, aims to equip executives with the tools needed to do business in far-flung climes. Heading to Vladivostok to seal an oil pipeline deal? Ecountries will give you the lowdown on who's running Russia's Far East.
It's a good idea in this mobile Corporate Age, so naturally the site attracts some heavy hitters, eager to know more. But now they know rather more than they anticipated because their e-mail contacts were mistakenly circulated by Ecountries as part of a regular update. It was as if a techie had cc'd 1500-odd subscribers into a standard e-mail template. You could call it a killer application.
The mail addresses took 15 minutes to roll into my inbox -- two from Ecountries and then another four from grumpy (un)subscribers. Two apologies from Ecountries followed -- then the spamming started. Imagine how long it would take to process maybe 15,000 addresses on a 28K dial-up modem. (No doubt it occurred to many on that high, net-worth Ecountries list that they had just been given a customer base.)
The same thing happened to a big Japanese electronics group a few years back, when they sent out 50,000 e-mails to people. Once it's done there's not much you can do about it. The cashed-up Japanese company has lived to fight another day -- and so will Ecountries with its $7 million of venture capital. But in this precarious, emerging market, where worried investors take any excuse to dump stock or pull out, these are mistakes you can't make more than once.
Eric Ellis is the Southeast Asia and Technology Editor of the regional
finance portal AsiaWise.com
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