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Imagine Henry Kissinger or Warren Buffett trying to pay his hotel bill at the Ritz in Moscow and being told by a desk clerk that his credit card was no good.
What's more, imagine how you would feel if it were your fault. That is the embarrassment facing newsletter publisher George Friedman.
Stratfor Global Intelligence is a highly respected daily newsletter devoted to world news, covert actions, military affairs, terrorism and intrigue. If you are an international news junkie, this is a must read.
Subscribers include high-powered and high profile folks in Fortune 500 companies, international finance, academia, governments, the military and the media.
The entire subscriber file was hacked, and the criminals started looting money from the accounts. The FBI alerted the issuers of nearly 100,000 credit cards of the account numbers that had been stolen, and presumably they were summarily canceled.
From CEO George Friedman's letter to his subscribers:
We knew our reputation would be damaged by the revelation, all the more so because we had not encrypted the credit card files. This was a failure on our part. As the founder and CEO of Stratfor, I take responsibility for this failure, which has created hardship for customers and friends, and I deeply regret that it took place. The failure originated in the rapid growth of the company. As it grew, the management team and administrative processes didn't grow with it. Again, I regret that this occurred and want to assure everyone that Stratfor is taking aggressive steps to deal with the problem and ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Read Friedman's entire letter and you'll discover a confession of incompetence by an academic Ph.D. that has no business running a business.
Overnight, Strafor Global Intelligence became an oxymoron.
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