52 articles · 2020 · page 3 of 3
Articles
Week of 23 March 2020
Forbearance on request: what the CARES Act asked of loan servicers
The CARES Act let homeowners with federally backed mortgages pause payments simply by asking, and told lenders how to report those accounts. Servicing built for the occasional exception suddenly had to handle requests, credit reporting and exit plans by the thousand, mostly from home.
Week of 16 March 2020
Hairpin traffic, distant data centers and the road to federal zero trust
As Washington sent its workforce home in March 2020, the bottleneck was not laptops but a network built to haul every connection back through the office. Fixing it moved federal security away from location and toward who you are and what device you use.
Week of 9 March 2020
Interoperability rules sent patient data beyond HIPAA’s reach
Two federal rules issued on March 9, 2020, banned information blocking and required standard data connections for patients. Together they let patients send their records into apps HIPAA does not cover, leaving health systems to govern data flows they could no longer refuse.
Week of 2 March 2020
Why the FFIEC’s pandemic statement was an evidence checklist
On March 6, 2020, bank regulators restated pandemic expectations dating from the avian flu era. The statement’s real value lay in what examiners would later ask to see: staged decisions, critical work done with fewer people, and suppliers coping with the same disruption.
Week of 24 February 2020
Buildings intact, workforce gone: the scenario continuity plans skipped
As markets fell and federal health officials warned of community spread, most continuity plans still imagined losing a building. A pandemic takes away people, suppliers and the usual tools all at once, and plans had to be rebuilt and tested around those three losses.
Week of 17 February 2020
Morgan Stanley and E*Trade: wealth scale is a client-data problem
Morgan Stanley’s deal for E*Trade, months after Schwab agreed to buy TD Ameritrade, was a bet on serving clients across do-it-yourself, advised and workplace channels. Whether that scale pays off depends on three layers of integration, and knowing the client comes first.
Week of 10 February 2020
What the Equifax indictment changed for banks, and what it did not
In 2020, the US charged four Chinese military officers over the Equifax breach. Knowing who did it settled an old question. For banks, it changed little that matters day to day: the data stays exposed, the door was ordinary, and the blame stays home.
Week of 3 February 2020
Iowa’s caucus app failed at rollout before it failed in code
The Iowa caucus app had a coding error, but the public failure came from a hard installation, untrained users and a backup phone line nobody had sized. Every agency launch carries the same three operational risks.
Week of 27 January 2020
A 90-day declaration that ran for three years
The federal public health emergency declared on January 31, 2020, looked like a precaution. Then other powers, new laws and agency systems came to rest on it. Agencies needed to track what depended on it from day one, not when it ended.
Week of 20 January 2020
Citrix gateways: the most exposed system in the hospital
The Citrix flaw exploited in January 2020 revealed that the gateway clinicians used to reach patient records from outside was a hospital’s most exposed system. Securing it took a clear owner, walls behind it and a search for intruders after every fix.
Week of 13 January 2020
Why a Windows crypto patch was an asset inventory test
CISA gave agencies ten business days to fix a flaw in how Windows checks digital identities, on the very day Windows 7 support ended. Installing the fix was easy. Knowing which systems needed it, who owned them and how to prove it was hard.
Week of 6 January 2020
Travelex’s outage was every white-label bank’s outage
Ransomware knocked Travelex offline, and the banks selling its travel money under their own names were left with no service and little to tell customers. If a partner carries your brand, it needs your controls: communication, contract terms and a plan for shared dependencies.