EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

I have a new guest blog just posted at for Tufin around Security Policy Orchestration.  You can check it out here.

Working in information security for the past 20 years, I have seen a lot. Though there have been many multi-million dollar impact breaches, the recent Sony Pictures hack and subsequent data exposure and extortion is probably the most impactful to a company out of the previous breaches this year.

When I started out in security, only very large organizations with a mature set of business processes dared to talk about implementing some form of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) or enterprise program (e-GRC). They generally did it in an attempt to get ISO or similar certification, or to “move their programs to the next level,” and some, I think, attempted it just to prove they did it. Many of those efforts were monumental, costing millions of dollars and taking years to complete. However, a significant number seemed to end in compromise, yielding a smaller end result or totally failing after thousands of man hours and millions of dollars for software, systems, and consulting had been spent.

There is no disagreement that the current mag-stripe technology used in the USA and other countries outside of the EU is antiquated and lends itself to fraud. The data is easily copied using various methods from manual card data copying and shoulder surfing, to database compromise and POS terminal malware.  Cards can be reproduced with off-the-shelf plastic blanks and a simple machine you can buy on the Internet.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a not-for-profit think tank of volunteers that spend their time trying to better the internet. These people are the antithesis of cybercriminals; they spend their energy trying to figure out ways to make our data safer. They create best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, or in this case, they determine how a cloud environment can be used to enhance and scale authentication for a service that can be cloud-based or private data center-based.

This week, Las Vegas hosted some 3500 people at the MGM Grand to mark Splunk .conf14, the annual user gathering for Splunk customers, referred to as “Splunkers”. For those of you not in the tech industry, spelunking, or the act of exploring caves, may come to mind. The theme of the conference was not cave exploration, but data exploration; however, the analogy of cave exploration actually aligns very well. “Splunkers” are diving into their data, delving deep into places that many have never explored before. Each of them finding new and cool ways to use the data that they have been collecting for years, just-in-case they ever needed it.

On April 23^rd, 2014 Dell announced its new Vulnerability Threat Monitoring and Prioritization service delivered through the SecureWorks Counter Threat Platform.  This managed service was created to expand the current Vulnerability Management offerings and increase customer value by creating the ability for customers to integrate their own vulnerability management systems.  With the additional context provided through Risk I/O, remediation and mitigation prioritization are done less in a bubble of the operational environment and more in context with the Internet threat universe.

What’s the issue with BYOD? Data Control… What’s the issue with Data Sharing? Data Control!

The emotions oscillate between high frustration and high jubilation as I observe cyber-attack teams’ hacking activities against an unnamed financial institution…