Ruby Shein
Ruby Shein was in her office reviewing magazine advertisements when the call came in from the Technical University. They had a public relations issue they needed to talk to her about. Ruby had done some work for the University. Her agency, Ruby, Inc. was a marketing and public relations firm. She had put together a small staff of very competent individuals, but she was a hands on director. She new all of the intricacies of each and every client.
The University apparently had a damage control problem. Somebody had broken into their network and has stolen some confidential information. What information that was was not yet revealed. The wanted her down there this afternoon. She rarely had a client make such a pressing request. Apparently, this was a big problem.
She cleared her schedule and drove to the University and made her way to the University Communications Department. Her primary contact was the University V.P. of Communications, Sally Brandt. When Ruby arrived, Sally swept her away to the board room.
President Alcomb was called into the board meeting to be apprised of the situation along with the other board members. Dan Cheadle’s boss, Kishti Nigam explained to them that a web page that was in development to display courses on the website was pulling data from a database. However, the developer never finished the code and the page had some code on it that allowed an outsider to access the website database. The tables that were compromised weren’t extremely confidential, but did have faculty addresses and contact information in it, as well as some student information, those who were signed up to take the courses being displayed. Nigam wasn’t sure how an outsider would use that information to do anything illegal as he stated it. He told them he deleted the file and changed the access rights on the database to shut out any further intrusion.
After some question and answer time, the board members started talking among themselves. The majority of them wanted to remedy the situation by contacting those in the database to let them know what had happened, and for the sake of the public, make some heads roll in IT. Nigam’s eyes sunk.
Sally introduced Ruby. Ruby began by saying “We do have a potential public relations problem here. I realize firing somebody over this will have an immediate effect, but does it really assure anybody that the problem is fixed. I don’t think it is time for that.” She realized she was sticking her neck out here. But Ruby wasn’t one to keep her opinions to herself. “I think we need to expose the criminal behind the break in, or at least close the door on what they intend to do.”
President Alcomb agreed with Ruby. He said “Kishti, do we have any leads?” Kishti said, “no, but the guy who discovered the break in has an agency that specializes in this kind of thing. His name is Ed Grepworth of Tower Algeis. I did some checking and some of my guys are familiar with him. The call him Ranger Ed, because he is constantly probing the internet looking for unsavory activity.”
President Alcomb said, “We need to get him in here.” Ruby can you work with our communications department to put a spin on this while we discover where this is leading.” Ruby answered, “sure, but when you do start the investigation, I need to know what is going on. I don’t want to be stating something in the public that is going to come back on me.” President Alcomb said he would route information back to her through Sally, who he has placed a lot of trust in.
