Hanging by a thread

To paraphrase a popular children’s cartoon of the past few decades, “If I had a nickel for every time I discussed an assassination on this blog, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.” 

Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by an assassin on his way to an investor meeting. I could lay out the moral implications at great length in this blog, but that’s not terribly important to this discussion. The point being is that this event is once again putting the security industry in the spotlight. 

A CEO of a multi-billion-dollar health insurance company being killed in broad daylight has served to highlight how little security he kept and has led to a fire sale on executive protection from frightened C-suites. I imagine monitoring services and surveillance cameras received similar attention, as it took law enforcement several days to apprehend a suspect.  

Any security expert that reads this blog would almost certainly tell you that the first and most secure step you can take is to prevent yourself from being a target. In the three years since Thompson took office, UnitedHealthcare’s profits went from $12 billion to $16 billion, and its rate of denials skyrocketed from 8% to 22.7% of claims, making him a target in some eyes. 

As Allied Universal’s Glen Kucera put it:  

“This is an eye-opening situation. Those decisions that are made in health care are either quality-of-life decisions or life-and-death decisions, so if something doesn't go as expected, it conjures an extremely aggressive posture. These become very emotional decisions, and those emotional decisions lead to more aggressive outcomes, in terms of crime.”   

If you want my 10 cents on how best to avoid situations like this in the future, a little caution goes a long way and that means the spotlight on the security industry will only intensify.