Information security lessons from Theranos
An explosive book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup wasn’t written about security awareness, but it could have been.
With the exception of a passing comment about digital forensics on a desktop computer and email controls, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Knopf) by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist John Carreyrou, seemingly has nothing to do with information security. It’s an extraordinarily fascinating and riveting book. And once digested, there are a number of lessons that anyone involved in information security can learn from.
A quick recap: Theranos was a health technology company that claimed it created a revolutionary method to perform a large battery of blood tests from a few drops of blood taken from the finger. Theranos was started in 2003 by then Elizabeth Holmes, a then 19-year old drop out from Stanford University.
With her charm and persuasiveness, Holmes was able to raise more than $700 million from venture capitalists and private investors. At its peak, Theranos has a valuation of over $10 billion, with Holmes net worth almost $5 billion. All of that came crashing down when Carreyrou wrote an exposé in the Wall Street Journal in October 2015 that exposed the fraud.
