Day: September 6, 2017

With the growth in cloud computing, businesses rely on the network to access information about operational assets being stored away from the local server. Decoupling information assets from other operational assets could result in poor operational resiliency if the cloud is compromised. Therefore, to keep the operational resiliency unaffected, it is essential to bolster information asset resiliency in the cloud.

To study the resiliency of cloud computing, the CSA formed a research team consisting of members from both private and public sectors within the Incident Management and Forensics Working Group and the Cloud Cyber Incident Sharing Center.

To measure cyber resiliency, the team leveraged a model developed to measure the resiliency of a community after an earthquake. Expanding this model to cybersecurity introduced two new variables that could be used to improve cyber resiliency.

• Elapsed Time to Identify Failure (ETIF)
• Elapsed Time to Identify Threat (ETIT)

Measuring these and developing processes to lower the values of ETIF and ETIT can improve the resiliency of an information system.

The study also looked at recent cyberattacks and measured ETIF for each of the attacks. The result showed that the forensic analysis process is not standard across all industries and, as such, the data in the public domain are not comparable. Therefore, to improve cyber resiliency, the team recommends that the calculation and publication of ETIF be transferred to an independent body (such as companies in IDS space) from the companies that experienced cyberattacks. A technical framework and appropriate regulatory framework need to be created to enable the measurement and reporting of ETIF and ETIT.

Download the full study.

Dr. Senthil Arul, Lead Author, Improving Metrics in Cyber Resiliency

[Cloud Security Alliance Blog]

Analyst firm Gartner projects that worldwide spending on IT security products and services will grow 7 percent, year over year, to reach a total of US $86.4 billion in 2017.

Historically, organizations have had a tough time allocating security expense budgets because:

• The concept of security was vague and unclear
• There is no methodology to assess the exact requirement and the resultant benefits, thus creating difficulty in establishing a sound business case
• No regulatory compulsion
• The evolution of technology, and its associated threats and digital perils, were slower.

In addition, in the absence of established norms on security spending metrics, many organizations adopted a magical figure of 4% of the total IT budget as the acceptable to spend on information.

Later, in line with the changing times, ISACA rightly clarified that security is a business enabler, and any spend on it needs to be monitored as an investment in line with the tenets of IT governance.

Now, with the current technological tsunami and the accelerated business initiatives struggling to keep pace, on top of regulatory pressure, information security – unsurprisingly – has become the number one priority. Gartner analysis further substantiates this by emphasizing the facts and figures through its analysis. The firm’s significant points include:

• More opportunity for security startups for offering specialist B2B services
• Growing demand for application security testing
• Growth in interactive application security testing projected through 2021
• The fastest-growing segment will be security services, especially IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation services
• The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which is due to come into force in May 2018, projected to drive 65 percent of data loss prevention buying decisions through 2018
• A big rise in the bundling of security services and broader IT outsourcing (ITO) projects, with managed security service (MSS), to rise from 20 percent currently to 40 percent by 2020
• Organizations should be doubling down on “basic security and risk-related hygiene elements,” such as threat-centric vulnerability management, centralized log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening.

All in all, this is a great news for the security profession. However, why should any organization spend millions of dollars on anything without a solid cost justification? Security costs, like any other costs, should be justified, for after all, more funding does not necessarily mean better security.

Investments in security controls do not directly contribute to revenue, but they prevent losses and safeguard reputation. Hence, security professionals should be able to help their organizations by using suitable security ROI metrics to choose the most economical and technically acceptable solution.

This will surely set in motion a strong, win-win relationship between the security profession and business leaders for the coming years, and establish security practitioners as a trustworthy partner to clients worldwide.

Ravikumar Ramachandran, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CRISC, CISSP-ISSAP, SSCP, CAP, PMP, CIA, CRMA, CFE, FCMA, CFA, CEH, ECSA, CHFI, COBIT-5 Implementer, Certified COBIT Assessor,  ITIL-Expert, Account Security Officer, DXC Technology, India

[ISACA Now Blog]

Privacy has had its Chernobyl moment.

Maybe it was when a foreign power stole everything every American had submitted for a clearance form from the Office of Personnel Management. Maybe it was when an insurer lost control of the health records of millions of Americans. Maybe it was when the United Kingdom spilled its child benefit data. Maybe it was when India created a biometric ID system and sort of forgot about controls.

However you want to define a privacy Chernobyl, it, or something like it, has happened.

We exist in a world where our expectation of privacy has been shattered, diminished and demeaned, and yet privacy invasions still outrage us. What we haven’t done is built a cap, and certainly not a sarcophagus that’s designed to protect the radioactive slag for an appropriately long time.

Privacy failures still make the news. Failures on the part of firms who have promised to take it seriously still result in 20-year consent decrees. (Recall that 20 years ago, in 1997, Alta Vista was still the dominant search engine, the Motorola flip phone was dominant amongst those weirdos who bothered with a cellphone, and 56k was pretty good internet connectivity through your phone line. Will word choices that seem agreeable today be sensible after 20 more years of technological acceleration?)

I want to encourage you to use Implementing a Privacy Protection Program: Using COBIT 5 Enablers With the ISACA Privacy Principles as a way for you to realize that personal data is radioactive, and you want to start treating it as such. If you accumulate too much, you risk a meltdown, but even when you have it in small doses, you want to be intentional about it.  You want to know why it’s here, how you’re protecting it, and how to get rid of it when the risk exceeds the reward.

You should be thinking of ISACA’s new privacy protection guidance as an important move forward in your privacy journey. It’s a necessary step, and going through the steps will help you understand if there’s more that you need to do.

Editor’s note: Additional privacy-related guidance can be found in ISACA’s new white paper, Adopting GDPR Using COBIT 5.

About Adam Shostack: Adam is a consultant, entrepreneur, technologist, author and game designer. He’s a member of the BlackHat Review Board, and helped found the CVE and many other things. He’s currently helping a variety of organizations improve their security, and advising and mentoring startups as a Mach37 Star Mentor. While at Microsoft, he drove the Autorun fix into Windows Update, was the lead designer of the SDL Threat Modeling Tool v3 and created the “Elevation of Privilege” game. Adam is the author of “Threat Modeling: Designing for Security,” and the co-author of “The New School of Information Security.”

Adam Shostack, Consultant and Author

[ISACA Now Blog]