Many advanced persistent threat (APT) solutions only detect these APTs – and don’t prevent them. These same solutions only support two applications rather than the host of applications attackers now use. This approach simply won’t solve the larger problem.
We invite you to read a new whitepaper, co-authored with MeriTalk, Defeating APTs in Government Networks, to learn about the growing problem of APTs on government networks and how your security platform must adapt for this new era.
Apple introduced its new Apple Pay, which allows Apple users with enabled devices, such as the iWatch, to use their devices to check out at participating vendors. The announcement was well received by the industry and industry analysts.
Despite the increased attention to security issues of the payment card industry, people seem to agree that the concept from Apple of keeping your personal information secret and using a random or one time generated token seems providential.
It is too early to tell what impacts Apple Pay will have, but it will surely start the journey away from PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). The main players—Visa, MasterCard and American Express—have shown great support to ensure the service works and large retailers are also supporting this change. Mobile operators are also showing support and are devising new SIM cards for 2015.
So the question is—how secure are the devices involved with processing Apple Pay, including the wearable? Should we worry or not?
The iWatch and your iPhone will be available to use with Apple Pay using NFC (near field communication) technology, which already has its concerns. Apple has addressed some concerns by integrating its Touch ID fingerprint scanner and its Passbook ticket-buying app into Apple Pay. This new approach keeps personal information on the device—instead of moving account data into storage servers within easy reach of thieves.
What happens if you lose your iPhone or iWatch? Some argue that you could lose your wallet as much as one of these devices, however due to the potential to access an enormous amount of personal data, the security and personal information on these devices today is of greater concern.
Although Apple has tried to address security concerns there are still some legitimate questions from a normal user perspective. How does someone verify a legitimate Apple Pay terminal or application on their device? What security does the mobile network provide on their end?
As with all new features and technology, I would suspect that elite criminal hackers may already be identifying opportunities to steal identities and mass-harvest payment card information from this new service.
What do you think—will Apple Pay be secure? As auditors and security experts, where do we stand and how are we preparing for this technology?
The man now leading security for a major university first got the security bug when dealing in government secrets about nuclear power.
If you had a broken toy that needed fixing when you were a kid, Quinn Shamblin was the neighborhood boy to take it to. Even as a child, Shamblin was “the guy who liked to know weird, unusual stuff,” and the go-to guy for taking things apart and putting things together.
“Infosec is the first career I really latched onto that uses all those old things that were drivers for me as a kid,” says Shamblin, now the executive director and information security officer at Boston University (which does not use C- titles like CISO).
He did not, however, set out for a career in infosec. He was a physics major, and after school was recruited to teach Naval forces about nuclear power.
It was then, while dealing with so much classified information, that he became interested in security.
He pursued that new fascination by going to work for Proctor & Gamble. At P&G, it wasn’t just the intellectual property confidentiality that was important, it was availability. They required 99.997% uptime, says Shamblin. “Eleven minutes would cost the company $200,000.”
Also at P&G, he met the manager who would be a professional mentor for the rest of his career.
“You need to have people believe in you,” says Shamblin. “Someone has to look at your work and say, yeah, wow, there’s value here.”
For Shamblin, that person was Kevin McLaughlin, a former felony investigator for the Army, who shared some of the same attitudes Shamblin had developed through his tenure in the military.
The two worked well together, so when McLaughlin left the company to go create a new information security department at the University of Cincinati, he invited Shamblin to join that new team.
It was McLaughlin again who recommended Shamblin for the job at Boston University in 2010, while declining the offer to take that job himself.
Shamblin is continuing the tradition by playing the role of mentor himself. Instead of hiring people who’ve done precisely the same job elsewhere, he hires people with promise and trains them up.
“I want people to get better and better at their job,” he says, “and I want them, at some point, to leave.” Shamblin believes that he’s preparing his employees for great careers wherever they decide to go, and in a broader sense, “improving the industry by investing in these people.”
Although most companies hire CISOs from outside the organization, Shamblin wants his successor to be someone he trained, and deliberately prepared to take over.
Most of the lessons he’s passing on to those future CISOs have little to do with technology, and everything to do with business sense and communication skills.
“As a CISO, it’s more important to understand risk and the business than to understand technology,” he says. “Understand that if I do X I won’t have a business.”
Shamblin says that a CISO needs to sound like a CFO. He or she must appreciate the balance of risk and reward, and must be able to comprehend a financial analysis. He did earn an MBA himself while working at the University of Cincinati, but there is something else he gives more credit for his success than his degrees.
“I can talk,” he says. “I’m genuinely interested in [people] and they can see it.”
One key piece of advice he gives to all aspiring CISOs is to improve their communication skills, both written and face-to-face. He urges them to get formal training on this, because the difference between a well-written email or document and a poorly written one is huge — but without training you might not see the difference.
If he weren’t an information security pro, Shamblin says he would pursue another career in emergency response — and isn’t that what a lot of infosecurity is all about?
This is part three of Dark Reading’s “How To Become a CISO” series. Read parts one and two now. Come back next Monday for the next CISO origin story, which is set in a law school.
Sara Peters is Senior Editor at Dark Reading and formerly the editor-in-chief of Enterprise Efficiency. Prior that she was senior editor for the Computer Security Institute, writing and speaking about virtualization, identity management, cybersecurity law, and a myriad of other topics. She authored the 2009 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey and founded the CSI Working Group on Web Security Research Law — a collaborative project that investigated the dichotomy between laws regulating software vulnerability disclosure and those regulating Web vulnerability disclosure.
For a long time, organizations and individuals have relied on third-party services relating to data, information systems, and infrastructure, and many lessons have been learned in the process.
Cloud computing has established itself as a potentially valuable addition to the portfolio of third-party services. But cloud computing can introduce several issues for data owners, particularly when the data is considered sensitive in terms of confidentiality, access rights and privileges.
While the benefits of cloud computing are easy to understand (e.g., lower cost, flexibility, transfer of accountabilities for operational activities), it is prudent to remember the old adage, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is,” and devote time to a detailed assessment of the issues described in our recent Journalarticle.
Cloud-related issues raised in conference discussions and various publications focus on concerns such as:
Data ownership and what the service provider is or is not allowed to do with this data
The use of encryption and management of the encryption keys and digital certificates
Identity and access management
Compliance with data protection legislation, particularly about the location of the data
Compliance with privacy protection legislation
Terms of contract, including the right to audit the service provider
Confidentiality and nondisclosures by the service provider
Access rights to data by the personnel of the service providers and its suppliers or service providers
Guarantees that in the case of termination of a contract there will be no copies of data left with the service provider
Other issues that could effect cloud computing are:
The impact on the data owners if the service provider goes out of business or is the target for an acquisition by a third party
The feasibility of terminating a contract and migrating the data (and related services) to another service provider
The real issue may be one of timing—the cloud is likely to be part of the service portfolio offered by third parties for many years to come. Optimists and risk takers will no doubt gain the benefits of cloud computing sooner and gain valuable experience in doing so. Those whose risk appetite is limited and deal with custom, critical applications may choose to wait until the issues discussed in ourJournal article have been addressed and resolved appropriately.
The Cybersecurity Canon is official, and you can now see our website here. We modeled it after the Baseball or Rock & Roll Hall-of-Fame, except for cybersecurity books. We formed a committee to get the process up and running and since my company — Palo Alto Networks– decided to sponsor the initiative, we’re now live with an official web presence.
We have 20 books on the initial candidate list but we are soliciting help from the cybersecurity community to increase the number to be much more than that. The committee will select inductees to the Cybersecurity Canon each, and we are now seeking books to put on that candidate list.
In order to do that, we need passionate readers like yourself to write book reviews for the website. The Cybersecurity Canon is an exciting idea. If you are a lover of great cybersecurity books – fiction, nonfiction, fanciful, technical — I hope you will support our cause. If you have a book that you absolutely love — and everybody that I talk to about this subject does — then please write a book review and get it nominated for the candidate list. The Cybersecurity Canon is a real thing for our community. We have designed it so that you can directly participate in the process. Please do so!
Introduction
I have been in the cybersecurity business for a long time and have consumed my fair share of books on the subject. In my basement, I have an entire library of titles that I know you would recognize as being famous at one time or the other in the past 25 years. A while back, I was perusing my collection and feeling superior to no one in particular because I had read these tomes when I suddenly realized that, although I remembered the gist of most of the titles, I did not remember a lot of the details. Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. I used to think that I was well read. The fact that I could not remember the details was a little disheartening and an indicator of how old I was. Right there in the basement, I decided to do something about it.
The Story
I gave myself the task of re-reading some of the more interesting books with the intent to take notes on the details so I could remember them in the future. Those notes eventually turned into book reviews that I published for my customers when I worked at iDefense. When I left iDefense, the new GM, Jason Greenwood, gave me permission to re-publish those reviews on my own personal blog site (Terebrate) as a service to the cybersecurity community. When I joined Palo Alto Networks, I re-published that collection on the Palo Alto Networks public-facing research blog in order to service a wider audience and start to build some community around the idea of a Canon.
After a couple of years of doing those reviews, I had a collection of about 20 that I thought represented the cybersecurity community. The reviews explained how these books told our cybersecurity history, explained our culture or represented the current and best thinking on a myriad of topics like cyber crime, cyber warfare, cyber hactivism, cyber espionage and privacy in a digital age.
I began to get the idea that this collection, and probably about a 100 more books that I had not reviewed or identified yet, made up a set of cybersecurity books that everybody in our community should have read at some point during their careers. Our community really needs a Cybersecurity Canon.
From The Free Dictionary, a canon “is a group of literary works [that the community generally] accepts as representing a field.” I presented this idea at the annual RSA Conference in San Francisco this year (2014) and it was well received — so much so that Palo Alto Networks decided to sponsor the concept. We decided to build the official Cybersecurity Canon
Not Just Technical Books
As I came up with my initial list, I considered the kinds of books that should be included in the Canon. I originally thought that it would be a collection of technical books. However, I soon discovered that although authors have published many fine books in this area, the technology evolves so rapidly that most of these books are now dated.
The idea of a Cybersecurity Canon, however, is to collect a set of books whose content is everlasting. Books that were very good upon initial publication but are no longer relevant today don’t meet the criteria to be included in the Cybersecurity Canon in most cases. There are technical books on my original list of 20 for sure, but they did not dominate the list like I had expected. So I turned my attention more broadly to non-fiction books; books where the authors detailed an important part of our culture or history or were able to capture the essence of a particular topic.
Finally, I considered novels. I know; that sounds strange that fiction might be included in a canon about a highly technical field. But it occurred to me that the target audience for the Cybersecurity Canon is not just a bunch of grizzled security veteranslike me. We might want to catch the attention of young people who have not decided yet if they want to join our community. If we can get them excited about the topic within a fictional setting, as long as the cyber is accurate and the details are enough to open some interesting discussions about the cyber landscape, then fiction should be eligible to be considered.
At the Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2014, our annual customer event, I selected Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous as the first book to induct into the Cybersecurity Canon. I delivered the same talk that I gave at the RSA Conference to the Ignite crowd, but this time we brought Parmy onto the stage at the end for a Q&A session. Afterward, Parmy stuck around and talked to the crowd and signed her book for all comers. We had a blast. All of a sudden, the Cybersecurity Canon had become a real thing.
The Tech
Right after Ignite, I formed a committee of prominent cybersecurity experts (including Parmy) and the team began building the infrastructure and mechanics to annually select one or more books from my initial list of 20, and other books that we have not yet identified or reviewed, into the official Cybersecurity Canon. I am happy to say that we launched the official website just a few weeks ago. Go take a look.
What does this mean to you? Well, we need your help. While the committee will select new inductees from the Candidate list every year, what I need from you is help building the candidate list. I expect the canon to grow over the years to include over 100 titles, which means the candidate list should be at least twice that size.
So here’s the ask: We need you to nominate books for the candidate list, but in order to nominate a book for the candidate list, you must submit a book review. This may seem onerous to you at first but bear with me. A review accomplishes two things: First, the book review will get posted immediately, once approved, and we won’t have to wait for a committee member to read the book and write a review. (A system like that would take months and create a bottleneck). Second, and maybe more importantly, you have to feel strong enough about your nomination to put some skin in the game. If you feel passionately about putting your book on the candidate list, you should at least have enough passion to spend a few hours and tell us why. So please, submit as many nominations as you wish, but first write a book review for each. The requirements for the book reviews are listed on the Cybersecurity Canon website.
We are accepting nominations for the Cybersecurity Canon Candidate list through the end of November 2014. Between December 2014 and February 2015, the committee will finalize the list of books on the candidate list. In February 2015, we will open the candidate list to the community for voting. The committee will consider the will of the cybersecurity community in deciding which books to include into the Canon in 2015. If all goes well, we will announce the winners at Ignite 2015 – taking place March 30-April 1 in Las Vegas – and we expect to have the winning authors on-hand to sign books. How great is that?
Conclusion
The Cybersecurity Canon is an exciting idea. If you are a lover a great cybersecurity books, I hope you will support our cause. If you have a book that you absolutely love, then please write a book review for it and get it nominated for the candidate list. The Cybersecurity Canon is a real thing for our community and we have designed it so that you can directly participate in the process. Please do so.
