Quelle: CIO USA

ON APRIL 25, PILOT NETWORK SERVICES went out of business,abandoning 200 customers that relied on them for somethingrather important: security. There had long been signs ofPilot´s distress. Customers had recently reported spottyservice from the managed security company. Pilot´s stock,once at $50, had plummeted to 21 cents per share, and Nasdaqdelisted it. Yet this was not some high-flying dotcom thatappeared one day, took some easy venture capital, thenvanished. Pilot was an established, 8-year-old vendor with400 employees and, by most accounts, superior securitytechnology and practices. Its customers included PeopleSoft,VisionTek, The Washington Post Co. and several largehealth-care institutions and banks.

Despite all that, the end came quickly. Pilot employeesreceived four e-mails in rapid succession. The first said thephones would be disconnected. The second added that pagersand mobiles would be taken away. The third said the CFO hadresigned. And for anyone who couldn´t see the elephant---notjust in the room but squirting river water in theirfaces---the last e-mail said, "At 4:30 p.m., you´re fired."

Pilot did keep a skeleton crew to manage customers´ securitythrough the data lines. Responding to desperate pleas fromPilot customers, AT&T suspended the order and kept Pilot´soperations center connected, even though it wasn´t gettingpaid.

With no one watching their networks and an outage threateningat any moment, Pilot customers felt naked. They were suddenlywide open to hackers and viruses. Because some companiesrouted office-to-office traffic through Pilot, they were atrisk of losing secure virtual private network (VPN)connections and remote access. Pilot had hosted entire Webnetworks for other companies, making them even morevulnerable to a complete meltdown.