Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect: Expert panel: As cyber security risks grow, architected protection and best practices must keep pace

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Expert panel: As cyber security risks grow, architected protection and best practices must keep pace

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Looking back over the past few years, it seems like cyber security and warfare threats are only getting worse. We've had the Stuxnet Worm, the WikiLeaks affair, China-originating attacks against Google and others, and the recent Egypt Internet blackout.

But, are cyber security dangers, in fact, getting that much worse? And are perceptions at odds with what is really important in terms of security protection? How can businesses best protect themselves from the next round of risks, especially as cloud, mobile, and social media and networking activities increase? How can architecting for security become effective and pervasive?

We posed these and other serious questions to a panel of security experts at the recent The Open Group Conference, held in San Diego the week of Feb. 7, to examine the coming cyber security business risks, and ways to head them off.

The panel: Jim Hietala, the Vice President of Security at The Open Group; Mary Ann Mezzapelle, Chief Technologist in the CTO's Office at HP, and Jim Stikeleather, Chief Innovation Officer at Dell Services. The discussion was moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Stikeleather: The only secure computer in the world right now is the one that's turned off in a closet, and that's the nature of things. You have to make decisions about what you're putting on and where you're putting it on. I's a big concern that if we don't get better with security, we run the risk of people losing trust in the Internet and trust in the web.

When that happens, we're going to see some really significant global economic concerns. If you think about our economy, it's structured around the way the Internet operates today. If people lose trust in the transactions that are flying across it, then we're all going to be in pretty bad world of hurt.

One of the things that you're seeing now is a combination of security factors. When people are talking about the break-ins, you're seeing more people actually having discussions of what's happened and what's not happening. You're seeing a new variety of the types of break-ins, the type of exposures that people are experiencing. You're also seeing more organization and sophistication on the part of the people who are actually breaking in.

The other piece of the puzzle has been that legal and regulatory bodies step in and say, "You are now responsible for it." Therefore, people are paying a lot more attention to it. So, it's a combination of all these factors that are keeping people up at night.

A major issue in cyber security right now is that we've never been able to construct an intelligent return on investment (ROI) for cyber security.
We're starting to see a little bit of a sea change, because starting with HIPAA-HITECH in 2009, for the first time, regulatory bodies and legislatures have put criminal penalties on companies who have exposures and break-ins associated with them.

There are two parts to that. One, we've never been truly able to gauge how big the risk really is. So, for one person it maybe a 2, and most people it's probably a 5 or a 6. Some people may be sitting there at a 10. But, you need to be able to gauge the magnitude of the risk. And, we never have done a good job of saying what exactly the exposure is or if the actual event took place. It's the calculation of those two that tell you how much you should be able to invest in order to protect yourself.

We're starting to see a little bit of a sea change, because starting with HIPAA-HITECH in 2009, for the first time, regulatory bodies and legislatures have put criminal penalties on companies who have exposures and break-ins associated with them.

So we're no longer talking about ROI. We're starting to talk about risk of incarceration , and that changes the game a little bit. You're beginning to see more and more companies do more in the security space.

Mezzapelle: First of all we need to make sure that they have a comprehensive view. In some cases, it might be a portfolio approach, which is unique to most people in a security area. Some of my enterprise customers have more than a 150 different security products that they're trying to integrate.

Their issue is around complexity, integration, and just knowing their environment -- what levels they are at, what they are protecting and not, and how does that tie to the business? Are you protecting the most important asset? Is it your intellectual property (IP)? Is it your secret sauce recipe? Is it your financial data? Is it your transactions being available 24/7?

It takes some discipline to go back to that InfoSec framework and make sure that you have that foundation in place, to make sure you're putting your investments in the right way.

... It's about empowering the business, and each business is going to be different. If you're talking about a Department of Defense (DoD) military implementation, that's going to be different than a manufacturing concern. So it's important that you balance the risk, the cost, and the usability to make sure it empowers the business.

Hietala: One of the big things that's changed that I've observed is if you go back a number of years, the sorts of cyber threats that were out there were curious teenagers and things like that. Today, you've got profit-motivated individuals who have perpetrated distributed denial of service attacks to extort money.

Now, they’ve gotten more sophisticated and are dropping Trojan horses on CFO's machines and they can to try in exfiltrate passwords and log-ins to the bank accounts.

We had a case that popped up in our newspaper in Colorado, where a mortgage company, a title company lost a million dollars worth of mortgage money that was loans in the process of funding. All of a sudden, five homeowners are faced with paying two mortgages, because there was no insurance against that.

When you read through the details of what happened it was, it was clearly a Trojan horse that had been put on this company's system. Somebody was able to walk off with a million dollars worth of these people's money.

State-sponsored acts

So you've got profit-motivated individuals on the one side, and you've also got some things happening from another part of the world that look like they're state-sponsored, grabbing corporate IP and defense industry and government sites. So, the motivation of the attackers has fundamentally changed and the threat really seems pretty pervasive at this point.

Complexity is a big part of the challenge, with changes like you have mentioned on the client side, with mobile devices gaining more power, more ability to access information and store information, and cloud. On the other side, we’ve got a lot more complexity in the IT environment, and much bigger challenges for the folks who are tasked for securing things.

Stikeleather: One other piece of it is require an increased amount of business knowledge on the part of the IT group and the security group to be able to make the assessment of where is my IP, which is my most valuable data, and what do I put the emphasis on.

One of the things that people get confused about is, depending upon which analyst report you read, most data is lost by insiders, most data is lost from external hacking, or most data is lost through email. It really depends. Most IP is lost through email and social media activities. Most data, based upon a recent Verizon study, is being lost by external break-ins.
When you move from just "I'm doing security" to "I'm doing risk mitigation and risk management," then you have to start doing portfolio and investment analysis in making those kinds of trade-offs.

We've kind of always have the one-size-fits-all mindset about security. When you move from just "I'm doing security" to "I'm doing risk mitigation and risk management," then you have to start doing portfolio and investment analysis in making those kinds of trade-offs.

... At the end of the day it's the incorporation of everything into enterprise architecture, because you can't bolt on security. It just doesn't work. That’s the situation we're in now. You have to think in terms of the framework of the information that the company is going to use, how it's going to use it, the value that’s associated with it, and that's the definition of EA.

... It's one of the reasons we have so much complexity in the environment, because every time something happens, we go out, we buy any tool to protect against that one thing, as opposed to trying to say, "Here are my staggered differences and here's how I'm going to protect what is important to me and accept the fact nothing is perfect and some things I'm going to lose."

Mezzapelle: It comes back to one of the bottom lines about empowering the business. It means that not only do the IT people need to know more about the business, but the business needs to start taking ownership for the security of their own assets, because they are the ones that are going to have to belay the loss, whether it's data, financial, or whatever.
We need to connect the dots and we need to have metrics. We need to look at it from an overall threat point of view, and it will be different based on what company you're about.

They need to really understand what that means, but we as IT professionals need to be able to explain what that means, because it's not common sense. We need to connect the dots and we need to have metrics. We need to look at it from an overall threat point of view, and it will be different based on what company you're about.

You need to have your own threat model, who you think the major actors would be and how you prioritize your money, because it's an unending bucket that you can pour money into. You need to prioritize.

The way that we've done that is this is we've had a multi-pronged approach. We communicate and educate the software developers, so that they start taking ownership for security in their software products, and that we make sure that that gets integrated into every part of portfolio.

The other part is to have that reference architecture, so that there’s common services that are available to the other services as they are being delivered and that we can not control it but at least manage from a central place.

Stikeleather: The starting point is really architecture. We're actually at a tipping point in the security space, and it comes from what's taking place in the legal and regulatory environments with more-and-more laws being applied to privacy, IP, jurisdictional data location, and a whole series of things that the regulators and the lawyers are putting on us.

One of the things I ask people, when we talk to them, is what is the one application everybody in the world, every company in the world has outsourced. They think about it for a minute, and they all go payroll. Nobody does their own payroll any more. Even the largest companies don't do their own payroll. It's not because it's difficult to run payroll. It's because you can’t afford all of the lawyers and accountants necessary to keep up with all of the jurisdictional rules and regulations for every place that you operate in.

Data itself is beginning to fall under those types of constraints. In a lot of cases, it's medical data. For example, Massachusetts just passed a major privacy law. PCI is being extended to anybody who takes credit cards.
Because all these adjacencies are coming together, it's a good opportunity to sit down and architect with a risk management framework. How am I going to deal with all of this information?

The security issue is now also a data governance and compliance issue as well. So, because all these adjacencies are coming together, it's a good opportunity to sit down and architect with a risk management framework. How am I going to deal with all of this information?

Risk management

Hietala: I go back to the risk management issue. That's something that I think organizations frequently miss. There tends to be a lot of tactical security spending based upon the latest widget, the latest perceived threat -- buy something, implement it, and solve the problem.

Taking a step back from that and really understanding what the risks are to your business, what the impacts of bad things happening are really, is doing a proper risk analysis. Risk assessment is what ought to drive decision-making around security. That's a fundamental thing that gets lost a lot in organizations that are trying to grapple the security problems.

Stikeleather: I can argue both sides of the [cloud security] equation. On one side, I've argued that cloud can be much more secure. If you think about it, and I will pick on Google, Google can expend a lot more on security than any other company in the world, probably more than the federal government will spend on security. The amount of investment does not necessarily tie to a quality of investment, but one would hope that they will have a more secure environment than a regular company will have.
You have to do your due diligence, like with everything else in the world. I believe, as we move forward, cloud is going to give us an opportunity to reinvent how we do security.

On the flip side, there are more tantalizing targets. Therefore they're going to draw more sophisticated attacks. I've also argued that you have statistical probability of break-in. If somebody is trying to break into Google, and you're own Google running Google Apps or something like that, the probability of them getting your specific information is much less than if they attack XYZ enterprise. If they break in there, they are going to get your stuff.

Recently I was meeting with a lot of NASA CIOs and they think that the cloud is actually probably a little bit more secure than what they can do individually. On the other side of the coin it depends on the vendor. You have to do your due diligence, like with everything else in the world. I believe, as we move forward, cloud is going to give us an opportunity to reinvent how we do security.

I've often argued that a lot of what we are doing in security today is fighting the last war, as opposed to fighting the current war. Cloud is going to introduce some new techniques and new capabilities. You'll see more systemic approaches, because somebody like Google can't afford to put in 150 different types of security. They will put one more integrated. They will put in, to Mary Ann’s point, the control panels and everything that we haven't seen before.

So, you'll see better security there. However, in the interim, a lot of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, some of the simpler platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers haven’t made that kind of investment. You're probably not as secured in those environments.

Lowers the barrier

Mezzapelle: For the small and medium size business cloud computing offers the opportunity to be more secure, because they don't necessarily have the maturity of processes and tools to be able to address those kinds of things. So, it lowers that barrier to entry for being secure.

For enterprise customers, cloud solutions need to develop and mature more. They may want to do with hybrid solution right now, where they have more control and the ability to audit and to have more influence over things in specialized contracts, which are not usually the business model for cloud providers.

I would disagree with Jim Stikeleather in some aspects. Just because there is a large provider on the Internet that’s creating a cloud service, security may not have been the key guiding principle in developing a low-cost or free product. So, size doesn't always mean secure.

You have to know about it, and that's where the sophistication of the business user comes in, because cloud is being bought by the business user, not by the IT people. That's another component that we need to make sure gets incorporated into the thinking.

Stikeleather: I am going to reinforce what Mary Ann said. What's going on in cloud space is almost a recreation of the late '70s and early '80s when PCs came into organizations. It's the businesspeople that are acquiring the cloud services and again reinforces the concept of governance and education. They need to know what is it that they're buying.
There will be some new work coming out over the next few months that lay out some of the tough issues there and present some approaches to those problems.

I absolutely agree with Mary. I didn't mean to imply size means more security, but I do think that the expectation, especially for small and medium size businesses, is they will get a more secure environment than they can produce for themselves.

Hietala: There are a number of different groups within The Open Group doing work to ensure better security in various areas. The Jericho Forum is tackling identity issues as it relates to cloud computing. There will be some new work coming out of them over the next few months that lay out some of the tough issues there and present some approaches to those problems.

We also have the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF) and the Trusted Technology Provider Framework (TTPF) that are being announced here at this conference. They're looking at supply chain issues related to IT hardware and software products at the vendor level. It's very much an industry-driven initiative and will benefit government buyers, as well as large enterprises, in terms of providing some assurance of products they're procuring are secure and good commercial products.

Also in the Security Forum, we have a lot of work going on in security architecture and information security management. There are a number projects that are aimed at practitioners, providing them the guidance they need to do a better job of securing, whether it's a traditional enterprise, IT environment, cloud and so forth. Our Cloud Computing Work Group is doing work on a cloud security reference architecture. So, there are number of different security activities going on in The Open Group related to all this.