Israeli Software

What is interesting and generally overlooked – is the cultural differences between the US and the rest of the world.  The Europeans prefer a more nuanced approach stressing discipline and procedures,The Americans are compliance driven and IT top heavy, I imagine if you look at DLP sales – 98% are in the US, being (right or wrong) compliance driven.

Last September, Forrester did a seminar in Amsterdam on data security – only 10% of the CTOs/CIOs that attended the meeting had plans to implement DLP in 2010.

The Europeans have a point – but, policies and procedures are only as good as the monitoring and enforcement behind them. This is where DLP comes into play- collecting data in several realms – data channels, content and organizational anomalies (downloads, uploads etc…).

In addition – there is a strong and well-known link between the social health of employees in an organization and the company’s economic/business health.  In a successful business unit – people are happy, and happy people contribute to the success of the business.   Unhappy people don’t identify, have problems contributing and leave or cross the line to malicious behavior.

For my money (and this is my experience in a dozen DLP deployments in EMEA) – the key value add of DLP technology is not the prevention part but the monitoring part and it’s role in a feedback / educational loop with the organization.

If you only do one thing this year – you should start measuring data security events and using those measurements to improve your policies, procedures and systems – and user education.

I want to challenge the effectiveness of top-down, monolithic security frameworks (ISO 27001/PCI DSS) – I submit that rapidly changing threats – social networking, cyberstalking, social engineering, cyber-stalking and custom spyware are threats that exploit people and system vulnerabilities but are not readily mitigated by a top down set of security countermeasures.

The recent case of the Opsec security violation on Facebook in Israel reported by the Jerusalem Post, is a good example of how a hierarchical organization (Army) is threatened by a flat social network. The good news was that the security countermeasure was found the social network itself – herein lies the lesson.

The IDF was forced to cancel a recent arrest operation in the West Bank after a soldier posted information about the upcoming raid on his Facebook page.The operation was scheduled to take place several weeks ago in the Binyamin region. The soldier, from an elite unit of the Artillery Corps, posted on his Facebook page: “On Wednesday, we are cleaning out [the name of the village] – today an arrest operation, tomorrow an arrest operation and then, please God, home by Thursday.”

The status update on the soldier’s page was revealed by other members of the soldier’s unit. His commanders then updated Judea and Samaria Division commander Brig.-Gen. Nitzan Alon, who decided to cancel the operation out of concern that the mission had been compromised.

Organizations need to leave the static top down control frameworks a few times a year and look outside the organization for links and interdependencies – and talk to the soldiers in the trenches in customer service, field sales and field service.

The information you will get from people outside your firm and from people with dirty hands is far more valuable than rehashing the ISO27001 check list in an audit.

The most valuable data is from questions you haven’t asked yet – not from a checklist in an Excel spreadsheet in the hands of a junior auditor from KPMG.

Reading through the trade press, DLP vendor marketing collateral and various forums on information security,  the conventional wisdom is that the key threat to an organization is trusted insiders. This is arguable – since it depends on your organization, the size of the business and type of operation.   However -

This is certainly true at a national security level where trusted insiders that committed espionage have caused considerable damage.  MITRE Corporation – Detecting Insider Threat Behavior

There are three core and interrelated problem in modern data security:

You may say – fine, let’s spend more time observing employee behavior and educate supervisors for tell-tale signs of change that may indicate impending involvement in a crime.

However – malicious outsiders (criminals, competitors, terrorists…) that may exploit employees in order to obtain confidential data is just another vulnerability in a whole line of business vulnerabilities.  Any vulnerability must be considered within the context of a threat model – the organization has assets that are damaged by threats that exploit vulnerabilities that are mitigated by countermeasures.   The organization needs to think literally  outside the box and at least attempt to identify new threats and vulnerabilities.

The issue is not that employees can be bought or manipulated, the issue is that government and other hierarchical organizations use a fixed system of security controls.  In reducing the organization’s security to passive executives of defense rules in their procedures and firewalls, we ignore the extreme ways in which attack patterns change over time. Any control policy that is presumed optimal today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow.  It is a fair assumption that an organization that doesn’t change data security procedures frequently – will provide an insider with  enough means, opportunity and social connectivity to game the system and once he or she has motivation – you have a crime.

Learning about change and changing your security systems must be at the heart of day-to-day security management.

At a recent seminar on information security management, I heard that FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is dead, that ROI is dead and that the insurance model is dead. Information security needs to give business value. Hmm.

This sounds like a terrific idea, but the lecturer was unable to provide a concrete example similar to purchasing justifications that companies use like: “Yes, we will buy this machine because it makes twice as many diamond rings per hour and we’ll be able corner the Valentine’s Day market in North America.”

The seminar left me with a feeling of frustration of a reality far removed from management theory. Intel co-founder Andy Grove said, “A little fear in an organization is a good thing.” So FUD apparently isn’t dead.

This post will help guide readers from a current state of reaction and acquisition to a target state of business value and justification for information security, providing both food for thought and practical ideas for implementation.

Most companies don’t run their data security operation like a business unit with a tightly focused strategy on customers, market and competitors. Most security professionals and software developers don’t have quotas and compensation for making their numbers.

Information security works on a cycle of threat, reaction and acquisition. It needs to operate continuously and proactively within a well-defined, standards-based threat model that can be benchmarked against the best players in your industry, just like companies benchmark earnings per share.

In his classic Harvard Business Review article, What Is Strategy?, Michael Porter writes how “the essence of strategy is what not to choose … a strong completive position requires clear tradeoffs and choices and a system of interlocking business activities that fit well and sustain the business.” The security of your business information also requires a strategy.

Improvement requires a well-defined strategy and performance measures, and improvement is what our customers want. With measurable improvement, we’ll be able to prove the business value of spending on security.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your information asset protection spending driven by regulation?
2. Are Gartner white papers your main input for purchasing decisions?
3. Does the information security group work without security win/loss scores?
4. Does your chief security officer meet three to five vendors each day?
5. Is your purchasing cycle for a new product longer than six months?
6. Is your team short on head count, and not implementing new technologies?
7. Has the chief technology officer never personally sold or installed any of the company’s products?

If you answered yes to four of the seven questions, then you definitely need a business strategy with operational metrics for your information security operation.

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Compliance is about enforcing business process – for example, PCI DSS is about getting the transaction authorized without getting the data stolen. SOX is about sufficiency of internal controls for financial reporting and HIPAA is about being able to disclose PHI to patients without leaks to unauthorized parties.

So where and how does DLP fit into the compliance equation?

Let’s start with COSO recommendations for internal controls:

“If the internal control system is implemented only to prevent fraud and comply with laws and regulations, then an important opportunity is missed…The same internal controls can also be used to systematically improve businesses, particularly in regard to effectiveness and efficiency.”

David Benyon from Op Risk and Compliance magazine reports

A new bribery and corruption legislation will be put before the UK parliament. Doing business using bribery would mean jail for a decade under the bill.

“The new Bribery Bill will make it far easier for companies and senior management to be prosecuted where bribes have been offered, paid or received. The new legislation will be even wider than the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because it covers business-to-business transactions as well as business transactions with government or state-owned bodies,” says Neill Blundell, partner and head of the fraud group at law firm Eversheds”

A common vulnerability in online ecommerce sites is fraudulent manipulation of user profiles in order to boost the ratings of products in online recommender systems and overall reputation of the web site.

This article – Unsupervised Retrieval of Attack Profiles in Collaborative Recommender Systems casts this problem as a problem of detecting anomalous structure in network analysis and proposes a novel mechanism for detecting this anomalous structure.

Like the warnings on cigarette packets – whistle blowing may be hazardous to your health.

HBOS chief risk officer Paul Moore blew the whistle on the bank’s risk exposure and lost his job. Last week, the UK Treasury Select committee heard allegations from  Moore ( who was sacked by Sir James Crosby in 2005) – that senior executives ignored repeated warnings about excessive risk-taking.

Following the political firestorm – Sir James Crosby has left his position as deputy chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority. Crosby was a close adviser to prime minister Gordon Brown, and former HBOS CEO – leading HBOS during a period of high-rolling profits.

Are there sins of hubris at your company – let me know!

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Fraud has become a big issue in energy derivatives trading.

A former Bank of Montreal (BMO) natural gas trader pled guilty in November 2008 to intentionally mismarking trades, resulting in  over $800 million of fraud-related trading losses.

The interesting part in the item on  EmpireStateNews.Net was that that the natural gas trader pleaded guilty to violating state banking law, not theft. So where did he money go?

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