A Modest Proposal for Salesforce Response

For the Second time in as many weeks, it was reported that Zeus-like trojans were targeting Salesforce customers through less-than-secure clients and not using any deficiency in Salesforce systems themselves (see The Register story here). The reasons I put Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff on my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team:

1. He was mentored by Larry Ellison.
2. He has proved himself on the corporate battlefield.
3. His "death star" should be more easily defended than companies that need to train and enforce security principles in every one of their enterprise customers' settings.

I'm still having trouble getting my brain around why someone would want to steal CRM data, as it would seem exceptionally hard to monetize. One high-probability answer is that this is a government-initiated attack, maybe by China, designed to give them a leg up as they compete worldwide with the clients of Salesforce. Whether or not this is the case, if I were in charge of Marc Benioff's crisis response efforts, I would run this ad on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for a few weeks:

Selah Marc. Selah.