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Public gives approval for cyber warfare (v3.co.uk)
Social Media Wars – The Google vs. Facebook Employment War Gets Messy (GALLERY) (trendhunter.com)

Building a Social Media Policy

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:53:19 +0000

: Image by ivanpw via Flickr

Social Media Policy

Social Media has become part of the user community several years ago. Today we have social media in the corporate environment. The main problem we have is how social media has evolved. It has been a bottom up approach. By bottom up I mean that the consumer has determined how to use a technology and the corporation is playing catch up. But the social norms that are appropriate for a consumer “product” are not appropriate in a corporate environment.

Social media usage is being retrofitted into the corporate environment. But the consumer is already used to using social media in an insecure, “information must be free” manner. Employees who have been used to giving up all their information in places such as Facebook and Twitter must now be retrained to use social media in a whole different manner to meet corporate standards. (Assuming we have a corporate standard for social media security)

But what is a corporate standard for using social media in an appropriate fashion that does not put the company at risk? Corporations have not made a concerted effort to define that secure social media strategy, or even a strategy for training their employees in the “correct” use of social media.

Social Media Policy Infrastructure

What is a good starting point for implementing a social media policy? Here is a basic guideline.

1) Define a policy – You cannot assume employees will do the right thing without guidance. You already have things like Expense Policies, Acceptable Use Policies, Internet Use Policies. Write a basic guideline. What’s in that guideline will vary from company to company.

2) Information Classification – You have to explicitly define what information can be shared and what information should not be Tweeted, FaceBooked, BlibbedBlabbaded (I made that up)about. If your employees do not know how valuable information is that you cannot blame them for inadvertently being sucked into the blogosphere. (I am not sure blogosphere is yet a word, but who cares)3) Keep It professional – If you allow your employees to Socialize (that a word with any meaning here?) information about your company, you have to give them standards to follow. Things like cursing, grammar mistakes, casual conversation style discussions might not be the image you want to portray when discussing anything related to your company.

4) Tracking and Monitoring – If you are going to have a policy for anything, you have to have a mechanism for tracking compliance, reporting on activity and have consequences for breaking that policy. How much tweets that are over the line makes you bring an employee before HR? What is a firing Facebook picture offense?

This is a very abbreviated start. In later posts I will define more aspects of a social media policy. But let’s get the conversation started about the necessity for this as a standard policy in every organization, both large and small.

HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style (mashable.com)
Social Media Strategy Lessons From Pepsi (businessinsider.com)
Social Media Costs UK Economy $22 Billion a Year (penn-olson.com)

Data Lifecycle Management: How to reduce risk (part1)

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:42:53 +0000

What is Data Lifecycle Management?

The Data Lifecycle goes through 5 steps: creation, usage, transport, storage and destruction. Most companies have parts of this lifecycle under control, but that means there are lots of areas for gaps in the control measures that could let a threat affect the data. The multiple part blog, (I am not sure how many parts it will take), will walk through the steps of the data lifecycle and what a company can do to implement a good process for all the data management challenges.

Data lifecycle management (DLM) is a policy and procedure based approach to manage information movement. Data has to be classified and evaluated to properly protect it with the right resources. Ownership is a key factor in managing and maintaining data throughout the lifecycle

The 5 Steps

Creation – How does data creation get managed?
Usage – What limitations are on data usage?
Storage – What controls are in place for storage?
Transportation – How is data transmitted between company, customers and business partners?
Destruction – What is the validation and verification process over data destruction?

The Data Management Problem

Weak processes in place to track creation usage, transportation, storage and destruction
Weak ability to monitor and manage a customer record throughout the lifecycle
Inconsistent processes across each phase of data movement
Lack of enforcement capabilities

What should be the goal of data lifecycle management?

Provide practical steps to manage each step of the customer record management process
Provide cost effective solution for risk mitigation
Provide framework for data management
Reduce risk of data loss

Challenges to Customer Data Records Management

Rarely does a company have a centralized process to track controls over data, over management processes around data, over logging and monitoring, and removal
Organizations rely on technology to secure data not processes that drive technology purchases
The 5 steps of data management are not followed by all functional groups in a company
No clear ownership and classification of customer data elements

Did you know…

1 in 400 emails contains confidential information
1 in 50 network files contains confidential data
4 out of 5 companies have lost confidential data when a laptop was lost
1 in 2 USB drives contains confidential information
Companies that incur a data breach experience a significant increase in customer turnover—as much as 11%
Over 35 states have enacted security breach notification laws
Can openers were invented 48 years after cans

Infosec 2010: A quarter of all firms have seen data integrity attacks (computing.co.uk)

What are the features you need a Windows Security Host Diagnostic tool?

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:56:50 +0000

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There is a lot of focus on network security and application security today. Years ago it was operating system security that was all the rage. But with the advent of the strict requirements of some of the regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, and FISMA, more attention needs to be paid to the operating system. As Windows is still dominant, what are some of the features you need to be concerned with in an application?

Some key feature of a host security assessment tool are:

Ability to quickly audit
Ability to inventory
Structure for classification of components
Patch management of course
Ability to baseline and report against the baseline
Templates of the regulatory requirements
Templates of different levels of security configurations
Threat identification and classification
User management
Port security assessment and management
Service and process analysis

A baseline configuration for operating system security, cover things such as patch levels, ports, services, processes, logging, policy settings and user configuration, should be the first step for any company in host security assessment and diagnostics. If you build from scratch, or don’t use a secure template, you will always be in trouble. Timely updates and reconfiguration of your baseline is necessary.

Your operating system like your network security should match your corporate business practices and procedures. Policies should be in place for this of course. Over time you should be able to benchmark your host security problems, solutions and changes.

Gary Bahadur

Address: 200 Se 1st St #601 Miami FL 33131

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Lumension Highlights Six Critical Elements To Ensure Painless FISMA Compliance (prweb.com)
Security vs. Compliance in the Cloud (web2.sys-con.com)
Security Compliance Manager – beta signup now available (blogs.technet.com)

Washington State implements PCI law

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:56:39 +0000

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PCI laws are expanding around the country. Washington State is the latest to add a law to their books. Washington state follows Nevada and Minnesota in implementing Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI), the law is HB 1149. It changes the breach notification law they already had on the books. The key point is that it allows issuing banks a method of collecting the costs to reissue payment cards after a breach.

Organizations who must abide by the law

It defines “business(es)” as merchants processing more than six million cards and sell to Washington state residents. “Processors” manage account information for others and “vendors” sell software or equipment that processes, transmits or store account information. Account information can is not so clearly defined. It will be interesting to see how companies outside of the state are affected. PCI Security Assessments are going to become even more prevelant.

How is the law implemented?

Entities that fall under the law are required to provide reasonable security measures. They can be liable for damage and if they have to reimburse their banks for reissuance of card, that can get very expensive. The law should probably have been more clear on this point

Determining a breach has been defined as “unauthorized acquisition of computerized data that compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information maintained by the person or business.” There is the possibility of confusion between account information and personal information. That will probably cause problems in the future lawsuits. Encryption is also going to be a challenge in the implementation and review for compliance requirements.

How this law integrates or conflicts with PCI requirements will news worthy. The different levels of PCI compliance and the levels identified by the law are now completely consistent. Can PCI SAQ assessment be enforced by the law? Can you be PCI compliant and not compliant with the law, or vice versa? I would venture to say yes.

If only we have a National Standard for all of this. Wouldn’t that be a progressive move?

Gary Bahadur

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Address: 200 Se 1st St #601 Miami FL 33131

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What are the challenges with protecting electronic documents?

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:36:37 +0000

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We have seen a lot of problems with Adobe vulnerabilities. Adobe has been getting beat up with all the negative publicity in the past few months. Apple is restricting access to Adobe on their devices. Has anyone tried their remote desktop sharing? I wonder if some vulnerability will be release in that application. What is the real problem with electronic document sharing and what are some of the solutions? Adobe is just an example; the whole industry of electronic documents is finally coming into its own.

Problems with Electronic Douments

How are people accessing electronic documents and how are they signing them and verifying them? Well there are multiple companies out there touting secure signature applications for documents. When do you use these companies? Some questions to ask include:
1. When and how do you determine the importance of the document?
2. Have you implemented a data classification scheme for electronic documents?
3. Who has the right to sign and read these documents?
4. How do you track usage and distribution?
5. Is there a time frame associated with the life of the document?
6. Can you prevent screen scraping of the secured document?
7. What is the “hackability” of the secure document?

Signing an electronic document can be a challenge for the technology challenged. Some documents might trigger antivirus or malware protection applications. If some intrusion detection applications can read a document or data loss prevention applications do not have access, you could be blocked from that document. Convenience of use is a major hurdle for the adoption of secure documents.

Printing, modifying, viewing, and deleting these documents require all kinds of levels of authorization that is probably difficult to manage. If you can have a location based “bomb” in the document for when it left the organization domain, that would be an interesting play on data loss prevention. We know client side options are easily broken, how do we change the mentality of secure document management?

I do not see how secure documents make too much sense in any public forum. Its not worth the effort to worry about secure documents outside of a strictly controlled corporate environment. Different forms of watermarking have their place in identification but not much in control.

The most likely areas are in Research and Development, Legal, Banking and Healthcare. These should be the quickest to adopt a secure framework for electronic documents. Some industry standards need to be followed and a process developed that all companies can follow. This would make it into all the data loss prevention applications eventually and really provide some security.

Gary Bahadur

Address: 200 Se 1st St #601 Miami FL 33131

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McAfee unveils new data loss prevention tools (v3.co.uk)
Hackers used malicious PDFs to attack Google and Adobe (infoworld.com)
Certified Document Services (CDS) Program Grows to Six with Post.Trust Announcement (blogs.adobe.com)

When will Vendors provide Risk Assessments of their products?

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:22:56 +0000

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Vendor risk assessment are not part of everyday corporate managememnt but it should be. If you drive a car and every week you have to get something fixed it would prove pretty annoying, disgusting, outrageous and you probably you would never buy that model again and probably wouldn’t by from that manufacturer either. So why do we accepts buggy software that is vulnerable to things like cross site scripting attacks, buffer overflows, malware and such? But we do that everyday.

Everything from vulnerable operating systems such as Windows to vulnerable applications such as Adobe and weak website such as Facebook. As stated by CIO.com, “SANS and Mitre, a Bedford, Mass.-based non-profit, federally funded technology research and development organization, today is also releasing its second annual CWE/SANS Top 25 list of the most common programming errors currently being made by software developers. The authors say the errors on the list are responsible nearly every major type of cyber attack, including the recent intrusions at Google (GOOG), and numerous utilities and government agencies.” The biggest companies are culprits.

So what are we do to about buggy software? How do you force a vendor risk assessment on all yoru vendors? Maybe scream “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!” Might feel good for a second or two, but not going to solve the almost daily patch process we have to go through for our software. Patch management is a thriving sector!

As I see it, some theoretical things the end user can do to change the deadly cycle of poor software:

Sue! I don’t know if that’s possible, but if you bought a car with bad acceleration problems (ahem Toyota) you might just sue the manufacturer if you got into an accident. What can we do that if some hacker breaks in through buggy software?
Stop buying from that vendor! Apple seems to be taking this tactic by not allowing Flash on the IPad. But can we all move away from Microsoft tomorrow? Probably not.
Make the vendors conduct Risk Assessments of their products prior to release. A third party risk assessment is probably a good idea. Something with more teeth than a SAS70 type review.

Gary Bahadur