What's your "checklist of choice" for an Enterprise State of Security review?
March 2, 2010

Just wondering how some people would and/or do approach an Enterprise State of Security assessment? Obviously given the plethora of standards, regulatory “guidelines” etc, there’s no right answers. (Including size and scope of such an exercise…assume it is possible of course!). Do you see it as something impossible? Would you use something like PCI DSS? Do you have your own framework/methodology? Keen to hear people’s thoughts.

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Securus Global: IT Security, Penetration Testing, Security Assessments, PCI Compliance, Product Assurance, QualysGuard, Security Strategy, Vulnerability Assessment.

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Posted in: Research, Risk Management, governance


APRA releases "guidance on the management of security risk in information and information technology "
February 5, 2010

APRA has released what they dub as a “prudential practice guide” – “on the management of security risk in information and information technology (IT) by institutions supervised by APRA”. Press release and document here.

It will be interesting to see how the “guideline” adoption will go. Similar to the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s “Internet Banking and Technology Risk Management Guidelines“, but a decade behind, and packing what seems to be no real regulatory push nor enforcement like that in Singapore.

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Securus Global: IT Security, Penetration Testing, Security Assessments, PCI Compliance, Product Assurance, QualysGuard, Security Strategy, Vulnerability Assessment.

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Posted in: Risk Management, governance


Looking at what makes good Application Security knowledge.
January 7, 2010

It’s always interesting reading about larger scale fraud like this one recently with the Bank of Queensland. You wonder in cases like this, had the accused pulled the pin earlier, would he ever have gotten caught? You wonder how many do get away with it – stopping before obvious alarm bells start to ring?

There’s no generic solution/strategy for fraud detection to critique, as each organisation addresses it’s own internal security and risk management practices differently, but there is a scary pattern of misguided thought in regards to securing systems and actually defending against, and detecting fraud. It’s “security” by definition but are many blinkered in regards to what the full definition of “security” encompasses? I think so.

Many in the security industry are focussed to the point of obsession on only vulnerabilities and technical attack vectors (new attack type X, new attack type Y – all generally old stuff just re-invented in different ways but promoted as new big things by many in the industry). It’s such a narrow focused view that stops at the technical exploit. That’s not where the role of a security professional should stop. Read on:

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Posted in: Applications, Bad Developers, Bad Stuff, Dumb Security, Forensics, IDS, IPS, Risk Management, Vulnerability Management, WTF, Web Application Security, cyber crime, governance


Core Security Skill Requirements
December 2, 2009

There’s always a load of articles talking about the “core security skills” that security professionals and companies will need to develop. With 2010 approaching, we’re starting to get the typical 2010 recommendations and predictions articles on this topic.

I wonder if many of these articles are written by, and targeted at people and organisations who might just be waking up out of their slumber into the real world that we, (security people), have lived in for the last 2 or more decades. The alarm’s on snooze still though in my opinion.

I find this interesting. Aside from keeping up with technical/researcher type knowledge, (which most of these articles rarely refer to), what are these new “core skills” that we should all be developing? Keen to know if I have missed anything.

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Securus Global: IT Security, Penetration Testing, Security Assessments, PCI Compliance, Product Assurance, QualysGuard, Security Strategy, Vulnerability Assessment.

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Posted in: Dumb Security, Research, Risk Management, WTF, governance


Repost: The 7 Reasons why Businesses are Insecure
December 1, 2009

This is a post from 2007. The theories and concepts date well before that. Taking technologies themselves aside, nothing much has changed in the last decade, (and one can argue that the technologies themselves haven’t either). Basic foundation principles, or rather the lack thereof in our strategic approaches/(thinking in regards) to Information Security and Risk Management are rarely addressed and thus we fail without even properly beginning the defence…or is that the offence?

Anyway, please read on and I would welcome your thoughts on whether you think anything has changed to make this any less effective.

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Posted in: Research, Risk Management, governance


CERT Australia Announced
November 26, 2009

Good luck to the AGD team with CERT Australia. Further reports:
- Australian IT mentions the role of AusCERT in this.
- AusCERT’s press release here.
*** Should have included this also in original post: http://www.ag.gov.au/cybersecurity

For those attending the AISA National Annual Seminar Day; David Campbell, (Director Australian Government Computer Emergency Readiness Team) will be talking about the new CERT. Should be an interesting presentation.

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Securus Global: IT Security, Penetration Testing, Security Assessments, PCI Compliance, Product Assurance, QualysGuard, Security Strategy, Vulnerability Assessment.

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Posted in: Risk Management, cyber crime, news


HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES STANDING COMMITTEE ON COMMUNICATIONS – Subject: CyberCrime
September 24, 2009

Transcripts from the 4 sessions. Interesting but a concern from the perspective that it seems Government does forget things it has done in the past and seemingly starts from scratch each time. Just my opinion. Light reading (and I mean that), but worth a skim through:

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/coms/cybercrime/hearings.htm

Thanks @cmlh for the link to this.

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Posted in: Research, Risk Management, cyber crime, governance


A Question of Control
September 11, 2009

By Declan Ingram

There has been a lot of discussion on here about 3rd party/cloud computing etc security (or lack there of). For many, this didn’t seem hugely relevant at the time as there was always a choice (or people just didn’t think it was going to be something that affected them). Recently however, the choice seems to be getting smaller.

The 3rd party management model is becoming…or should I say, has become, so popular now, that it is hard to keep control. (Control? Yes, of your information!).

Think about it. How much of your security is technically enforced by a 3rd party appliance? (And, how secure are they?) How much of your data is housed, managed, monitored, etc by a 3rd party? Professionally and personally we are giving ourselves away. More importantly, has this been looked at during your last Threat Risk Assessment? (Has you organisation even done one?)

From my experience, so many organisations that we audit have core data and systems housed and managed by 3rd parties, and nearly all of them have dangerously one sided contracts……Dangerously favouring the 3rd party.

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Posted in: Bad Stuff, Dumb Security, Industry Specialists Talk, Risk Management, governance


Outsourced (unauthorised) Vulnerability Assessment – Testing for Porkies!
August 28, 2009

Looking at data like this from the Conficker Working Group and talking to many Information Security Managers/CSOs still having to deal with outbreaks in their organisations, you have to wonder what’s going on? The general theme seems to be; “Infrastructure lead told us this was under control….they patch (always!)…..they now tell us [post infection], they “sometimes” patch!….Now it’s out of control!”

LOL…usually same guys who see no merit in vulnerability assessment/management systems and penetration testing (plus security in general?). Why buy something like QualysGuard when you can get a pretty thorough test for free I suppose? (If you can deal with the repercussions). From the CSO perspective; Automated Porkie Testing…no client-side input required. :)

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Posted in: Bad Stuff, Dumb Security, Risk Management, Vulnerability Management, WTF


Randon Links and Rants…….
August 22, 2009

- Didn’t the 4 Corners Episode; “Fear in the Fast Lane” generate some discussion and debate this week? I didn’t post anything about it myself here for a couple of reasons; (1) I didn’t think anything new and worthwhile was worth highlighting, and, (2) People were “twittering up a storm” over it – some of it very over the top. (Refer to #4corners on Twitter search for more on that). Interestingly, from within our own industry, the discussion was more personal – questioning people’s credentials as “experts” as opposed to the actual content itself in many cases. Some fair questions raised and some not so in my opinion. I welcome your thoughts here.

-Which leads me to discussions and analysis on who are the “experts”. Anton Chuvakin, our Qualys and PCI friend ponders the question here; “A Myth of an Expert Generalist“. The same question was also raised in the Beast or Buddha forums a little while ago in the post titled; “Internet Security ‘Expert‘”. I had some thoughts on this topic (and the 4 Corners episode) on my twitter; here and here. Chris Gatford, an industry colleague in Australia and one of the people heavily featured during the 4 Corners episode responded to this here.

- Hackers vs Federal Police was a big story this week here as reported in the SMH; “Hackers break into police computer as sting backfires“. Some things get reported and some don’t: http://r00tsecurity.org/files/zf05.txt. No more to add. Everyone’s a target and everyone’s ownable (well at least you’d bet on it it being the case). Kind of makes a mockery of some of the talk on the conference circuit. Waffle vs substance…what do people want to listen to? Can most even judge?

- I’ve recently been invited to write for Tek-Tips Forums. Yep, that’s my mug. I’ll link the posts from here also when I remember to do so. After coming back from a holiday, the inspirational juices aren’t really flowing but I expect things will start to annoy me and then I’ll be back to normal. :)

- Had to repost this one: “How not to setup a Hotel Safe”; I took this photo recently in a hotel in Croatia. At first I thought I must be missing something here (like being able to program the code) but no, this is it. Needless to say, I didn’t use the “safe”. :)

- And finally, off the Information Security topics. The latest issue of Top Gear magazine (which I thought was not the Australian one – yuk….but seems now like some sort of a combination of Aus and UK) has a home fridge magnet Cool Wall – most cool! Here’s my “Cool Wall“.

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Posted in: Bad Stuff, Dumb Security, Risk Management, Vulnerability Management, Web Application Security, cyber crime, news


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