Integrating Security into the Corporate Culture
{LANG_NAVORIGIN} Enterprise Security
Steve Purser
10/06/2004
Introduction
At a major security conference several years ago, I asked a group of
security professionals to define risk in such a way that it could be
understood by non-specialists and then to suggest different ways of
reacting to risks once they had been identified. Interestingly enough,
many of those present were able to come up with good examples of risks,
but defining risk in practical terms as a concept turned out to be a
difficult exercise, even for security professionals. Equally
interesting was the fact that although everyone realized that risks
could be managed by some kind of mitigation exercise, very few people
identified the option of transferring the risk to a third party (e.g.
by insurance or contractual means) and even fewer suggested that it
might make sense to simply accept certain risks. The important point
here is that thinking about risk is not necessarily simple and even the
experts can have difficulties when they are put on the spot.
Nevertheless, the notion of risk is at the heart of information
security. Implementing real security involves understanding
security-related risk and reacting appropriately and, in general, the
better employees are at doing this, the more secure the enterprise will
be. Put another way, even well-designed technical controls and
procedures will be of limited value if the staff involved do not
understand why they have been implemented, what they are accomplishing
and their limitations. As the previous paragraph illustrates however,
achieving this level of understanding represents a major challenge and
normally involves a great deal more than an annual awareness
initiative. Indeed, for many organizations this will involve a cultural
change requiring the integration of security concepts into the working
culture.
Recent surveys in the area of information security confirm that there
is still a lot of progress to be made in this area. Hence, one of the
key findings of the 2004 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey is
that although organizations view security awareness training as
important, they do not on average believe that their organization
invests enough in this area [1]. This conclusion is supported by the
Ernst & Young 2003 Global Information Survey, which reports that only
29% of organizations list employee awareness and training as a top area
of information security spending [2]. Much along the same lines, the
Australian Computer Crime and Security Survey 2004 notes that “the most
common challenges and difficulties respondent organizations faced were
changing user attitudes and behavior (reported by 65% of respondents)
and keeping up to date with information about the latest computer
threats and vulnerabilities (reported by 61% of respondents)” [3].
Finally, the DTI Information Security Breaches Survey 2004 points out
that the relatively low priority businesses give to educating their own
staff is surprising given that a significant proportion of businesses
recognize a need for more information security advice from third
parties [4]. These results are largely in line with previous surveys in
this area [5].
This short paper analyzes why organizations should consider spending
more time on developing a culture that is both aware and capable of
responding to security-related risk and goes on to suggest ways in
which this could be achieved.
Why culture is important
Before examining techniques for introducing cultural change, it is
useful to look at some of the ways in which the level of staff
awareness and training can have a drastic effect on the success or
failure of the security process as a whole or on specific security
mechanisms and procedures. In order to make the point, we will (rather
arbitrarily) look at four separate areas within the information
security process:
- The decision making process.
- Client-side security.
- Server-side security.
- Recognizing and handling incidents.
Of these examples, the first provides the best example of how a lack of
education and awareness can fundamentally compromise the whole
information security process. In order to understand this, it is
important to realize that one of the biggest paradigm shifts that has
taken place in the area of information security in the last decade is
the realization that security is a business issue. In other words,
although much of the analysis, design and implementation of security
solutions will require highly-competent technical staff, the key
decisions should be driven by business concerns and not technical
ones.
When viewed from an opportunity and risk perspective, this makes a lot
of sense – organizations take risks every day and the way in which they
take risk can be considered to be a part of their business model.
Indeed, there is nothing particular about security-related risk, except
perhaps that it can be extremely difficult to understand when IT
systems are involved. When viewed from an awareness perspective
however, the survey data cited in the introduction suggests that this
is a rather hopeful view of things and, in reality, many organizations
might not have attained the level of user awareness and education
necessary to make this model work in practice. Organizations that have
adapted their core processes to align with this model without having
achieved the necessary awareness may well find that the real decision
making is taking place outside the agreed procedural framework. Under
such circumstances, business managers will not have the knowledge or
understanding necessary to make an informed decision and are more
likely to blindly accept recommendations made by specialists, rather
than to challenge them.
The fact that user awareness and education has a big impact on
client-side security is easy to understand. Even when client software
and operating systems are locked down (and in principle inaccessible
to the end user) it is clear that poor decisions made by the latter can
easily compromise security. Hence, user communities that do not
appreciate the techniques that are used to spread viruses and other
malicious code via E-mail and web channels will be more open to
infection by malicious code in the window of risk before the
corresponding pattern files are available. Similarly, inappropriate
responses to pop-up boxes during a web session can have wide reaching
consequences. More fundamentally, where users do not enforce a minimum
of physical security over their personal computers or laptops, not only
are they open to theft, but it may be possible to modify the
configuration using attacks that exploit the boot sequence (similar to
NTFSDOS or linux boot disk attacks). Widening the discussion to other
types of client device, staff that upload business data to PDA devices
may not take the time to consider what the impact will be should the
device be lost or stolen, whereas those that limit the use of PDAs to
receiving and sending E-mail have little control over the information
that is sent to them (and so may unwittingly store confidential
information on the device).
Taking the example of malicious code one stage further, it is obvious
that once a client has been infected, it is usually only a matter of
time before servers are infected too. For example, where infection
spreads by infecting files, the file server will be infected as soon as
the client saves an infected file. A more interesting example of where
poorly adapted cultural values can have a big impact on server-side
security is in the area of system administration. Where administrators
consider repetitive tasks as dull and uninteresting, these tasks may
not get done or, at best, they may be carried out reluctantly. For
instance, due to the complicated syntax of entries in the log files,
performing a correct log analysis for some platforms requires
highly-skilled staff. Where such staff are in short supply and there
are more interesting tasks to be done, there may be a tendency to avoid
the more routine work. More generally, it is often easier to motivate
engineers to implement new technology than to administer it once it is
in place.
The last example in this section is concerned with recognizing and
handling incidents. Whereas recognizing some incidents (such as a virus
infection) is relatively straightforward, others can be very difficult
to recognize. Personnel that are sufficiently aware of security issues
and correctly trained in their day-to-day activities should be capable
of developing a ‘feeling’ for what constitutes normal behavior of the
system or process they are dealing with. This is extremely important as
the control system (i.e. the procedures and mechanisms deployed to
reduce IT security related risk) is designed to cope with known risk
scenarios. Where unusual risk scenarios crop up, the capability of
recognizing unusual behavior is at the root of incident recognition.
Furthermore, the extent to which the organization is really secured
will also depend on the ability of staff to handle incidents
appropriately, which usually means understanding and correctly using
existing incident handling procedures.
These short examples illustrate that real security is not just a
question of well-designed technical infrastructure and tight
procedures. In order to ensure the right result, staff must understand
the framework they are working in and be capable of adapting their
behavior to respond to new and unforeseen events.
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