Re: rant: Abandon Ship! Data Loss Ahoy!

["Tracy Blackmore" <tblackmore () tslad com>]

Something I haven't seen in this thread is...
 
Many companies give either consultants or manufacturers loads of money to 'secure' them or 'verify' that they are 
secure.  being a consultant myself I've seen this all too often.  This (obviously) does little to actually secure 
anything!
 
To properly secure something companies must create a culture of security - starting with solid policies that are more 
than pieces of paper that sit in a book until the auditor needs them.
 
Only with these policies that define the who, what, when, where, why, and how can good controls be put into place that 
support those policies.
 
Any old fool can purchase a firewall and put it on the network - but I could tell you stories of how many I've come 
across with the old Any/Any rule because of lack of proper policies.
 
And then companies like Qualys... I think they offer a great service - but too many companies think that just because 
they use that service that they are secure.  Qualys does NOTHING but offer information.  How a company uses that 
information, if at all, is up to the company!
 
Me personally? I'd take security out of the hands of the IT department!  Give it to a non-IT CSO who is dedicated to 
developing that culture of security with the proper policies to back it up.  With that, proper guidance can be passed 
on to the IT department to deploy the controls necessary to support them.
 
Tracy Blackmore, CISSP
Independent Consultant
T.S. Lad, Inc.
www.tslad.com
 
 

________________________________

From: dataloss-bounces () attrition org on behalf of James Ritchie, CISA, QSA
Sent: Thu 3/20/2008 1:44 PM
To: dataloss () attrition org
Subject: Re: [Dataloss] rant: Abandon Ship! Data Loss Ahoy!



Being compliant does not mean being secure and being secure does not
mean being compliant.  What most people forget with all the compliance
is that constant vigilance must be maintained.  Does that mean daily,
weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually that you have to verify that the
controls are working appropriately? What I think will be the outcome is
if appropriate due diligence and due care can be shown as fact, the
liability will be reduced or eliminated.  They will compare the actions
taken and of similar size companies to see if what they had done was
appropriate. To make any company 100% secure, the cost of security would
be so prohibited, the company would be bankrupt.  There has to be a
balance and reasonable effort shown.

Adam Shostack wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:13:08AM -0500, Allan Friedman wrote:
> | >  On the public policy issue, I agree. If you want companies to disclose
> | >  the exact circumstances around a breach (exact technical details), there
> | >  will have to be a shield that prevents plaintiffs attorney's from using
> | >  the information in lawsuits.
> |
> | You highlight an interesting trade-off. It may be the case that more
> | disclosure would reduce incentives to prevent future breaches,
> | depending on how we understand the problem.
> |
> | A standard policy tool for enforcing maximum diligence is the threat
> | of lawsuits, massive ones that can wreck a corporation. If we follow
> | this liability argument (as advanced by Schneier and other scholars of
> | the economics of information security) then making concessions to
> | corporate defendants can impede the end goal of less data retention
> | and greater data protection.
> |
> | If we don't think we're ever going to get there, then more data about
> | breaches for the purposes of research is clearly the greater good.
> | This is a very interesting dynamic. I'll have to think about how to
> | model it...
>
> For this policy to be effective, costs must be aligned with a failure
> to take effective measures.  Today, we lack the data to asses how
> effective various 'best practices' or standards are.  Gene Kim and
> company have done work showing that a few part of COBIT are key, and
> others are not correlated with they outcomes they studied.  (There's a
> CERIAS talk video you can find.)  There's claims that Hannaford was
> PCI complaint. Shouldn't that have made them secure?
>
> So lawsuits today are random.  With better data, we may be able to
> better attribute blame.  Perhaps this shapes a temporary liability
> shield, with a goal of revisiting it later, or allowing case law to
> shape it for a while?
>
> Adam
>
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>  

--
James Ritchie
CISA, PCI-QSA, ASV, MCSE, MCP+I, M-CIW-D, CIW-CI, Inet+, Network+, A+

Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/b89/433

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Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () attrition org)
http://attrition.org/dataloss

Tenable Network Security offers data leakage and compliance monitoring
solutions for large and small networks. Scan your network and monitor your
traffic to find the data needing protection before it leaks out!
http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/compliance.shtml