On April 25, Pilot Network Services went out of business, abandoning 200 customers that relied on them for something rather important: security. ... the end came quickly. Pilot employees received four e-mails in rapid succession. The first said the phones would be disconnected. The second added that pagers and mobiles would be taken away. The third said the CFO had resigned. And for anyone who couldn't see the elephant-not just in the room but squirting river water in their faces-the last e-mail said, "At 4:30 p.m., you're fired." . . .
On April 25, Pilot Network Services went out of business, abandoning 200 customers that relied on them for something rather important: security. ... the end came quickly. Pilot employees received four e-mails in rapid succession. The first said the phones would be disconnected. The second added that pagers and mobiles would be taken away. The third said the CFO had resigned. And for anyone who couldn't see the elephant-not just in the room but squirting river water in their faces-the last e-mail said, "At 4:30 p.m., you're fired."

With no one watching their networks and an outage threatening at any moment, Pilot customers felt naked. They were suddenly wide open to hackers and viruses. Because some companies routed office-to-office traffic through Pilot, they were at risk of losing secure virtual private network (VPN) connections and remote access. Pilot had hosted entire Web networks for other companies, making them even more vulnerable to a complete meltdown.

One such company, Providian Financial, was so distressed that it sent several IT staffers to man Pilot's operations center. That probably frightened Pilot's other banking customers, none of whom were expecting a competitive financial institution to have access to their network security.

The link for this article located at is no longer available.