It’s been another fantastic year on The State of Security blog. With over 350 blogs published from all walks of the security community, we like to think of the blog as more of an industry resource that caters to not only experienced security professionals but also to those who are new to the community. To finish the year off, I wanted to look back on some of my personal favorites. I’ve tried to include a mixture of different styles, topics and authors.

When mainstream cloud computing first began to appear on the horizon, (Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud product in 2006.) many organizations were initially hesitant to entrust their most valuable data and processes to a technological innovation named after something that appears so delicate. Oh, how times have changed.

Honeypots are not a new idea. They have been part of the cybersecurity world for decades and have frequently gone in and out of “fashion” over that period. Recently, though, they have become an increasingly important part of vulnerability management. That’s for a couple of reasons. Honeypots offer real-world data on the types of threats that companies face, and they can be a powerful research tool in identifying specific threat vectors.

TikTok, the popular video posting app, has come under increased scrutiny. Recently, two lawsuits filed against the platform accused TikTok of privacy violations. According to a report from Reuters, a plaintiff accused TikTok of creating an account without her knowledge or consent in one lawsuit filed in California. The lawsuit accused TikTok of creating a file on the user. This file allegedly included biometric data based on videos that the user created, but did not upload.

At some point in the past, I began making new year’s resolutions for doing a bit of personal privacy and security maintenance on New Year’s Day or thereabouts. I would usually have a bit of downtime to finally get around to doing the things I’d been putting off all year. It’s become a fun habit that I wanted to share.

I recently wrote about phishing around the holidays and while I was working on the piece, I noticed a couple of friends posting recent emails on Facebook. I thought it might be fun to dig a bit deeper into those emails and look at the telltale signs that indicate these are phishing attempts.

How likely is it to fall victim to fraud? As far as I’m aware, I personally have not purchased from a fraudulent site, but I have had my card details stolen in the past. Additionally, I remember years ago that while attempting to find a flat, I found a ‘rental company’ who turned out to be one person attempting to rent out flat 13 that due to superstition didn’t actually exist.

That phrase came to me many years ago when working on a multi-million pound IT outsourcing deal. We were up to our necks in the finer points of platform-wide and stack-deep security, and I realised we were fighting amongst ourselves more than challenging the final competing vendors. This infighting was partly due to the large amount of IT staff in the room likely to transfer to the winning team and partly due to the view of security controls as a bolt-on extra.

Context setting: In my first article on cloud security, I talked about the journey to cloud migration. What are the things you need to consider when planning the big move? To realize the full value of this post, you must have already identified the motivations for migration and the locations of some resources you can use to enhance your security posture within yourself and/or your team.

In an ornate boardroom, a group of executives gathered at a large round table for their annual strategic planning meeting. Morgan, the CEO, was surrounded by Lana, the VP of Sales; Susan, the CISO, Smith, the COO; and Barbara, Chief Compliance Officer. There was much to get done in the next twelve months, so they were passionately debating how best to invest their limited budget to achieve their goals and to address various sources of risk.

Businesses are always looking for ways to control and reduce the cost of doing business as well as gain a competitive advantage over their respective competitors. The constant pressure of doing more with less has introduced many offerings designed to reduce the cost and complexity of the IT/OT infrastructures that support the business. Let’s take a look at some offerings that have been introduced to address these challenges.

Whilst working for a management consultancy, I learned a lot more about industrial control systems (ICS) than I ever imagined I would. In many cases, this wasn’t from working on them directly; it was from simply speaking to the technicians and reading documentation. Oftentimes, we have the false belief that our systems are safe from compromise because no one really knows how they work. It’s like security through obscurity.

In my line of work, it is often a requirement to provide our customers with background information on the employees who will be performing on-site professional services. This is not in itself an issue, but how the customer receives and handles that information can be. Tripwire best practice is for HR to provide an attestation of all requested background checks to our clients rather than providing detailed background reports or having the client run a background check on our employees.

After spending several decades in this industry, I have seen growth in many different security products and in many different areas. All the while, I’ve questioned whether specific technologies were offering real value or were just over-marketed to create more revenue opportunities for investors. As we have seen repeatedly, categories of security products blossom in many different ways. So many vendors, so much technology. Where do we go from here?

I am all about the baselines. I’ve made an entire career out of them. But if you were to ask a random person on the street what that means, the reaction would be: “Who the heck are you, and why are you asking me random weird questions.” So it would be better if you found someone in the tech industry at least.

I have wanted to do a series like this for some time. I frequently watch movies and point out social engineering and OSINT techniques or inaccuracies as well as OPSEC blunders. These blunders, in addition to the matrix style waterfall screens, are equally bad as the “hacking” you see in movies.

The City of Waco has warned residents that their online payments for water services may have been intercepted by hackers who stole credit card details. The heart of the problem lies in the third-party online payment software that Waco and several other cities and municipalities use to let residents pay their bills, pay parking fines, as well as make other financial transactions.

Finding a security vendor that is the best fit for your company’s business objectives, culture, risk profile, and budget is challenging today. The purpose of this blog is to suggest that working with a “vendor partner” is more than working with a standard technology vendor in that a partner aligns not only with “Technology” concerns but also with “People and Process” concerns.

The Risk Management Framework (RMF) is most commonly associated with the NIST SP 800-37 guide for “Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems: A Security Life Cycle Approach,” which has been available for FISMA compliance since 2004. This was the result of a Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Interagency Working Group; it’s something that every agency of the U.S. government must now abide by and integrate into their processes.

As we begin our new decade of the 2020s, we can look back at the last 30 odd years and examine the collaboration between technology and our daily lives. If you think of your day-to-day, it’s easy to see how much our society relies on technology. Consider our smart devices such as mobile phones, watches, even homes. However, what about the technology that we don’t see, that gives us clean drinking water, removes wastewater, and keeps our homes warm?

In the not-too-distant future, I can clearly see how ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HITRUST certifications could become a diminished, legacy activity, viewed as a rarity left over from marketing efforts to distinguish an organization’s security posture from its competition. Absurd? Unrealistic?

Consider how many times a day you check your mobile phone, smartwatch, smart TV, and/or other connected devices. How normal does it seem to be reaching out to an external source, not actually sure where this information is stored, or even coming from, but that it’s there, accessible and ready to be taken in? Organizations wishing to migrate to a third-party cloud solution (‘the cloud’) need to understand this point well.

CyrusOne, a major provider of enterprise data center services, is reported to have suffered a ransomware attack. The Dallas-headquartered company, which operates more than 30 data centers across the United States, China, London, and Singapore, is reported by ZDnet to have had some of its systems infected by the REvil (Sodinokibi) ransomware.

The shopping season is upon us, and like it or not there are lots of individuals who would love to replace your happiness with their sadness. Thus, at this festive time of the year, it is imperative to give some thought and prep time to you and your family’s shopping habits and the security that surrounds those habits. If you’re like most people, you will NOT be using cash for all your holiday purchases.

Docker is an awesome technology, and it’s prevalent in nearly every software developer’s workflow. It is useful for creating identical environments and sharing them between development, testing, production, and others. It’s a great way to ship a reliable software environment between systems or even to customers. However, like with any technology, one must know how to be secure when using it.

If you are responsible for cybersecurity or data protection in your organization, stop what you are doing and read this report. Actually, first, go patch your servers and applications and then read this report. Much like Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the Payment Security Report (PSR) is a must-read for security professionals.

Many of the current telephone scams use caller ID spoofing to mask the identity of the caller. A few of those telephone scams spoof caller IDs that don’t match the North American standard for legitimate numbers. These blatantly obvious spoofed caller IDs are the target of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

The path is starting to get steeper now as we climb to ML2. It is time to start defining a vulnerability management program with objectives and goals. This program is expected to grow and evolve over time as the organization grows and evolves. Start by documenting what is in place now and what objections the organization is trying to reach. The stakeholders should come from multiple departments within the organization. For example, you will need buy-in from:

As we wind down 2019, it is a great time to think about your vulnerability management plans for the coming year. The five W’s can help guide our efforts as we resolve to improve our digital security for the coming new year. Vulnerability assessments are useful for detecting security issues within your environment. By identifying potential security weaknesses, these assessments help us to reduce the risk of a digital criminal infiltrating its systems.

In this, the final post in my series on considerations for managing your security with cloud services, we will be looking at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). If you haven’t yet read the previous blog entries about SaaS and PaaS, it’s worth going back to read these first, as much of the thinking associated with these services is also true for IaaS.