Skip to main content

When education isn't enough

So first off, I think awareness and education is an important part of any comprehensive security program. BUT you can't think that just by talking about security or training people on what to do to reduce the chance they are a victim of an ID theft, phishing, or other attack that you have significantly changed the risk profile of your company!

I've recently seen a couple of Senior security leaders expound on the fact that they just need to bring the knowledge to the company, and leave the rest to the operational people (Sysadmins, network admins, etc.) to actually implement any controls, etc.

This fails on many levels. Without proper leadership, oversight, and guidance, the IT Operational teams won't know if they've met the requirements of the policies, best practices, etc. Someone needs to tell them to do more, do less, or they've hit the mark. This needs to be consistent and comply with all appropriate regulations, compliance requirements, etc.

The basic controls must be documented, standards must be developed and documented, processes must be created in conjunction with stake holders, and the controls must provide metrics and results that are measurable (and can be tuned, improved, etc.) and this all must match the company's risk appetite and work along side the company's business objectives.

To expect that training alone will solve all of these issues is sheer sophistry.

->Pierre

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Requirements for Information Security

If you want to get into Information Security you HAVE to be a/have this skill... Why this is total BS. Almost daily I see someone posting on twitter, trying to be helpful to folks who are looking to get into InfoSec. Often I see "If you want to be in Information Security (Cyber Security) then you HAVE to be a programmer" or "If you want to be successful you have to be a hacker/have a criminal record/have abused systems without permission" etc. While having technical capabilities (such as programming) and having the ability to compromise a system shows a specific skillset neither are required. When talking to people who are interested in Information Security I often refer to it as a cake, there are tons of slices, many flavors, many pieces and parts you can sample, choose to focus on, will be expected to know something about, etc. Incident Response and Forensics (my current focus) is not the only part of Information Security, and certainly not the only part tha
Post a Comment
Read more

Busting the myth of the malicious insider

The Myth of the Insider Threat Too often after the announcement of a new breach, the first reaction from the victim company and the media is "another malicious insider attack".  Case in point, I was catching up on news from various sources and came across the following: http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/19647/lessons-sage-leak " “We believe there has been some unauthorised access using an internal login to the data of a small number of our UK customers so we are working closely with the authorities to investigate the situation,” the Newcastle, England-headquartered firm said in a statement." Of course an internal login was used to access the data, as part of the attack lifecycle, during your reconnaissance phase you identify accounts to target for possible compromise, based on the access/role of the individual.   Phishing attacks or other simply attacks are often successful in gathering login credentials for individual users, which can then of
Post a Comment
Read more
Weekly recap and why you should be concerned about "attackers" even if you have "nothing to hide" Why you should be aware of, defend against, and prevent attackers... even at home: I often hear from future victims "well I don't have anything to hide/anything of value/why would they target me!?" It's really not about you, usually the attackers aren't looking for your data (if they get it, or have easy access to it, they may try to profit from it, but the people doing the compromising aren't usually the same folks that monetize). What the attackers want are compromised systems they can use to do what they want at scale. So if they can compromise 50 systems, they can send 50X the amount of SPAM... 100 systems, 100X, etc. Some operations get paid based on the number of emails they can send per day. Of course the email will likely not just be SPAM, but may also be malicious (ransomware, etc.). http://thehackernews.com/2017/09/linux-ma
Post a Comment
Read more