This editorial was originally published on June 16, 2005. It is being re-run as Steve is away at training.

I can't really disclose who told me this, or at which company, but I found it very interesting. Recently there was a worm that rolled through a large number of Windows systems on the Internet. A few friends told me about it since it had rippled fairly quickly through their companies. These were all large organizations, with over 2,000 people employed in each of them. However, one company had almost no infections. The spread between their internal systems was almost non-existant.

Now I'm sure that you are all wondering what great technique they used so you can deploy it in your environment. I was as well, until I heard the details. I dismissed it at first, but then thought it did make some sense. I'm not sure I'd recommend the technique, but it was interesting.

Their defense was chaos. They don't really have a central IT organization, standards are almost non-existent, no central AD setup, not even a standard platform. They do make anti-virus, firewalls, etc. available, but it is up to individual departments, people, and labs/data center areas to deploy them as they see fit. Need a resource from another group? Better start making friends. Want to breach a firewall? I'd recommend buying a Starbucks card or a 6 pack of Red Bull for the admin of that firewall.

Now this is a technology company and most of the employees are fairly smart technologists. They are each responsible for the most part for their systems. If they break it, they need to fix it or find someone to help because a broken computer is not an excuse for work not being complete. But an individual can have a Mac, PC, Sparc, run Windows, Linux, whatever, as long they get their job done.

Samba is in use as a file system in many places, but permissions control is distributed. Sarbanes-Oxley, secuirty, auditing, etc. all still apply, but there is no central group that ensures it's performed in a consistent manner.

As I mentioned, at first I was shocked. I thought this was ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it made some sense. You couldn't easily break into their network because what worked in one place wouldn't necessarily work in another. Compromise one password and you might not get very far at all, even if you had an administrator password.

I'm still not completely sure what to think of this, but apparently it works. Probably just like my life with three kids and a wife that works hard. You juggle all the balls and hope none of them drops.