CSO

From Cyber Jihad to Human and Computer Viruses - It has been a busy week

A German man has reportedly been arrested after crawling several popular German social-networking sites for data and then allegedly trying to extort $120,000 from the sites' operators.

Napolitano is making a great leap of faith that we are at that point in the Cyber Security maturation cycle and this leap is much like Evel Knievel’s jump across the Snake River.

The amount of labor and effort to run this operational task has worn thin. No longer am I interested in dealing with tape for anything but keeping my bumper on the old car with duck tape. Other than that, tapes and cartridges need to go the way of the floppy disk. Time to take them out back and shoot them!

This is the first part of my podcast interview with Edward Schwartz, CSO of NetWitness. In this installment, Mr. Schwartz comments on regulatory compliance as a driver for security spending. He shines a light on how myopic focus on complaince can be dangerous to the organization.

The recent outage and potential irretrievable data loss in Microsoft’s Sidekick services highlights one of the fundamental flaws in much of what today is known as cloud computing. That is, not only is there the possibility of one’s data being inaccessible due to a service outage, but there is the very real possibility that data may be lost forever because of a failure of the service provider to adequately backup its systems. Ordinarily, these types of risks are easily mitigated by the inclusion of strict protections in your contract with the service provider ensuring data will be available when needed and backed-up to protect against catastrophic failures.

SecurityBinge – a team composed of Chris Martin aka pr34ch, Tim Elrod aka ri0t, and Stefan Morris aka Janus – are forging a video podcast show addressing information security from the hackers’ perspective. SecurityBinge, according to its founders, “will have a community-driven focus in the delivery of its high quality video productions.”

According to Sun Tzu, the Tao is the Way – the context that defines how actions are perceived and valued. In a business context, corporate values and culture define the Tao. The success of any strategy depends on how it is supported by the Tao.

Gartner points out that encryption must be extended to all personal computers, not just company servers. Encryption not only addresses data leakage during personal and business use, but also when the hardware is retired. Disposed hard drives are often salvaged for the information they store. They recommend using strong encryption on files containing such information. Encryption Security Solutions' eSafe addresses this need.

What may 2030 look like to a CISO/CSO or the regular information security practitioner?
What will be the prevalent form of Information Security Risk Management?

Although I can’t provide definitive answers I feel confident enough to share some thoughts and predictions knowing that it is unlikely that I’ll be made accountable for them in 20 years.
Nonetheless, this may be a useful exercise to foster longer term strategic thinking about the infosecurity community, the market and the evolution of threats and risk.