It seems like every product or service that somebody is trying to sell me has the words “bank” or “financial institution” attached to it. The cynic in me would say that either the SOX cash cow is drying up and the vendors are trying to glom onto FISMA, or the only past performance that these small-fry vendors have is with a bank that bought their solution once.

Part of me also wants to know if banks will buy whatever junk I throw at them. =)

So is the secret to selling a product to the government a cleverly crafted Unix shell command like the following:

cat marketing.literature.sox.txt \

| sed ‘s/SOX/FISMA/’ \

| sed ‘s/bank/government agency/’ \

> marketing.literature.fisma.txt

You would think so based on the spam I get nowadays. It’s so obviously retreaded that I keep wondering “Do you guys even believe your own literature and hyperbole about what you’re trying to sell?” I don’t expect sales people to be the experts at my business, but how can you offer me a solution to my problems if you don’t understand the gist of what my problems are? If you don’t know that bank security is primarily modeled on integrity and that government security is primarily modeled on confidentiality, then we don’t really have a common language.

My vendor spam for today is below. “Compliance as a Service” makes my head explode. I think somehow I should be building a list of security spammers as a “Wall of Shame” to help out the people who would actually buy from these vendors. If anything, I’ll know who not to buy from–the list is getting large enough so that I need to write it down to keep track of.

 

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• On Why I Blog… FUD is the Reason for the Writin’
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• The Vendors are Already Jumping on the 07-11 Bandwagon
• Ack! With the Mandates!