Offshoring Partners & The Hand That Feeds

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:44:24 GMT

People are catching on to what the smart kids knew all along: of course Google's Chinese offices were compromised. And not just Google, and not just in China, and not just by China.

Ten years ago, the disloyal insider was a fact of life about which there wasn't much to be done. You'd mitigate as best you could with careful access control (right?) and handle incidents as they occurred. Beyond that, what? Fire all your foreign visa holders?

Times have changed. Global enterprises are investing in China, India, Russia, and elsewhere, creating new opportunities for an entire generation of workers to succeed without having to emigrate from their own cultures and communities.

And that's how I, Eric the Prophet, can predict roughly what Hillary Clinton is going to say to China on Thursday:

All of this investment is supposed to give you guys some skin in the game. Surely you don't prefer the previous arrangement, in which the "developed" world lures China's best and brightest abroad, and China's role in the global economy is relegated to "factory?"

Is anybody else just a little bit curious as to the global economy's capacity to issue pink slips in countries whose governments can't or won't prevent the emission of cyberattacks?

p.s. On a personal note, I helped Microsoft select candidates for IT Security positions in China back in 2004. As I recall, wages for Chinese IT staff were on the order of US $5.00/hr. Whatever resentment I felt towards Microsoft at the time for not cutting me in on the expected savings has given way to something more like schadenfreude.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/18/attack-google-inside-job/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Job: Security - posts tagged 'offshoring'

Offshoring Partners & The Hand That Feeds