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NFIP Back in Action — At Least Temporarily

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What timing. The National Flood Insurance Program received temporary re-authorization last night by the U.S. Senate. The vote puts the NFIP back in business until September 30.

This is good timing for those along the coast as the storm season has kicked into gear with hurricane Alex now battering the coast of Mexico and south Texas. As the Insurance Journal states:

“It is alarming that the NFIP was allowed to remain expired for so long, causing so much confusion and potentially leaving desperate homeowners and small businesses unprotected for almost a month,” said Robert Rusbuldt, Big “I” president and CEO. “While the Big ‘I’ is appreciative of Congress extending the program on a temporary basis, we are also greatly concerned that these short expiration periods and patchwork of temporary extensions will negatively impact the market.

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The program lapsed June 1 for the fourth time. Now, the measure sits on President Obama’s desk, awaiting his signature. If signed, it would allow any new policy application or renewals that were signed and submitted during the hiatus to become effective from the date of application.

The official end to the 2010 hurricane season is November 30 — two months after the program’s new expiration date. Not good news, considering this hurricane season is predicted to be much more active than average — Weather Services International is calling for 20 named storms, with five being a category 3 or higher. Without more support from Congress, this hurricane season could prove not only historical in terms of storms, but also in uninsured property damage.

tsunami

By the Numbers: The Gulf Oil Spill

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Newsweek has created a great slideshow illuminating some staggering numbers about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I suggest you head over there and read it in full as they include insightful synopses/explanations of each, but these were the few figures I found the most interesting:

  • Time it would take the United States to use the oil spilled so far: 4 hours, 24 minutes
  • Number of response workers: 42,000-plus
  • Percent of the spill that’s natural gas: 70%
  • Cubic feet of natural gas set ablaze: 1 billion
  • Number of suggestions received with ideas to stop the spill: 112,000

Along with that last factoid, Newsweek also included the below video of Kevin Costner talking about his invention that can siphon polluted water from the Gulf, extract the oil from it and dump the clean water back into the sea. He came up with this “oil distiller” while filming Waterworld when he — for God knows what reason — partnered with his brother to create an actual, working version of a prop used in the film. Obviously, the device did not need to work in the movie. It’s Hollywood make-believe and we viewers would have just believed that the theoretical physics they discussed worked considering it is, ya know, a movie set in the distant future that featured a plot where the globe was entirely submersed by ocean and “dry land was a myth.” But, nope, Kevin needed realism within his work of fiction, so the brothers Costner fabricated a working model of this centrifuge-based “Ocean Therapy” technology.

And now, hopefully, we will all owe the man a big round of applause. After conducting a few tests, BP purchased 32 of the machines from Costner a few weeks ago and has already begun using them to aid the clean up efforts. The technology is not perfect (as you can learn about here), but it is helping — which means Kevin has almost certainly done more to help the Gulf of Mexico, marine life and affected coastal communities than you have.

Overall, it’s easily the best thing he has done since Thirteen Days.

Cryptographic Lock Baffles the FBI

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encryption

Cryptography: The art of writing or solving codes.

Daniel Dantas: A Brazilian banker whose arrested in 2008 for attempting to bribe a police officer. He is also suspected of money laundering, embezzlement and other financial crimes. More importantly, he has managed to fool not only the South American authorities with his cryptographic locks on his numerous hard drives, but also the FBI.

That’s right — since July 2008, when Dantas was arrested, the FBI and officials throughout South America have tried fruitlessly to decrypt files held on the banker’s hardware (a story I first saw this morning on the Schneier on Security blog).

As The Register, a UK-based newspaper, states:

The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil. The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code.

A full year of diligent work from highly-intelligent code breakers and still nothing? Dantas seems to have chosen the right encryption software and password. We’ve seen that choosing a secure password, though very important, seems difficult for many to do. In an article we ran back in April entitled “The Real Enemy,” we highlighted the ignorance of many password-choosers.

Back in 1990, a Unix password study revealed that the most popular password was “12345.” Today, even with the proliferation of hacking and data security warnings, the most popular password, chosen by 320,000 of all users on RockYou [a web app company], was “123456”-an entire digit longer. This was followed by the 1990 favorite “12345” and then, creatively enough, “123456789” and “password.” About 20% of the people on the site picked from a relatively small pool of only 5,000 passwords. According to the data security firm Imperva, these poor passwords mean that “with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second or 1,000 accounts every 17 minutes.”

It’s 2010 and it seems only Dantas and a handful of others are successful at securely encrypting their sensitive data. What can we learn from this? Choose better passwords, engage encryption software if necessary — and the FBI isn’t as smart as we think.

The Supreme Court’s Sarbanes-Oxley Ruling in Plain English

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If you’re like me, you’re not that smart. And when you read complicated articles like this New York Times breakdown of Monday’s Supreme Court decision involving Sarbanes-Oxley, your head starts to hurt a little. Wait? What exactly happened? Will this change anything for companies?

Fortunately, Anand Rao, partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, is an expert in the history of and the controversy surrounding Sarbanes-Oxley and can clearly explain exactly what you need to know about the Supreme Court’s ruling.

supreme court

Jared: What was the main controversy about Sarbanes-Oxley that the Supreme Court was ruling on?

Rao: Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 as a response to some of the accounting issues related to Enron and Worldcom. The law created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to regulate the accounting industry. The five board members were accounting specialists appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC could remove board members if there was a good cause to do so.

Free Enterprise Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, along with a small Nevada accounting firm Beckstead and Watts challenged the creation of the PCAOB in Sarbanes Oxley, specifying that the removal of board members by the commission for just cause contravened the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution as it gave wide-ranging executive power to board members without subjecting them to presidential control.

Jared: Why did the Court rule against this structural set-up?

Rao: With a 5-4 majority ruling, the Supreme Court declared that the act “not only protects Board members from removal except for good cause, but withdraws from the President any decision on whether that good cause exists.” It claimed that “by granting the Board executive power without the Executive’s oversight, this Act subverts the President’s ability to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed.” To remedy this situation the Supreme Court has ruled that the SEC now may remove the Board members at will, without the need to demonstrate a good cause.

However, the Supreme Court made it very clear that this had no bearing on the remaining aspects of the Sarbanes Oxley Act by stating that the “unconstitutional tenure provisions are severable from the remainder of the statue.” So for all practical purposes, there will be no change to the way PCAOB operates.

Jared: Will the change have any effect on companies? How about risk and compliance employees? Insurance companies?

Rao: Although the Supreme Court ruling impacts how board members may be removed, it has no impact on what public companies need to do. All public companies will continue to be subject to the same requirements as before under the Sarbanes Oxley Act and there will be no change to the operational functioning of the public companies. Similarly, there will be no impact to risk and compliance employees or insurance companies – it’s just a re-validation that the act is here to stay.