Importance of Information Security Awareness Programmes

Most businesses are starting to recognise the importance of information security, both from the perspective of regulatory or legal responsibilities, and from a viewpoint of good business practice and brand protection.

But information security policies, procedures and practices are only as good as the people and systems that operate them. If the people who work in the system don't understand their role, their responsibilities and why the controls are in place, then the results can be as bad for your organisation as not having them there in the first place.

Over the last few years there have been many stories in the press about information security failures within major organisations and government bodies. These organisations almost certainly had information security policies in place at the time of the failure. So why did it still occur and what can we learn from the mistakes of others?

As already stated, information security policies are only any use if they are understood, are adhered to and ultimately enforced as part of the culture within an organisation. Many of the well publicised information security failures have occurred because either the staff involved didn't know their responsibilities, weren't aware they were breaching the policies, or were operating without adequate supervision.

Another common failing is that information security policies do exist but are complex documents, unlikely to be thoroughly digested and understood by staff, even where they have apparently 'signed them off'.  This often means that staff ignore, or at best pay lip-service to the policies and the only time they are truly understood is following a security failure.

In most cases, a programme implemented to raise awareness of information security may well have prevented the failure, either partially - reducing the impact of the failure; or completely, by preventing the breach from occurring in the first place.

A carefully implemented information security awareness programme, encompassing properly documented, easy to understand security policies, standards, procedures and staff guidelines, along with ongoing training and evaluation, is a proven method for reducing information security failures.

It ensures your staff are aware, not only that the policies exist and that they are expected to adhere to them, but also why they exist, what their responsibilities are and how to operate on a day-to-day basis to maintain the required level of security. It also allows management to understand the levels of awareness within the organisation and provides them with the ability to target any specific issues which may arise.

Finally, even a good information security awareness programme needs to be backed up with a policy of open reporting. Having a 'blame culture' is not a good environment in which to raise information security issues.  Staff need to feel they can report actual or potential problems without the threat of some kind of retaliation or witch hunt!

Location Based Services & Security

It seems that more and more location based services are surfacing, jumping on the Social Media bandwagon.

Now, I'm not an old fuddy-duddy, and I can see how some of these services might be of use to businesses and potentially to individuals. I do however, have massive concerns over the privacy and security of these services.

Firstly, there is the physical security aspects. The information about where you are could be used to target you personally for malicious intent. This could range from mugging you as you leave a venue to burgling your home while you're out.

Then there are the issues of who has access to this information. There are various rules and laws which apply to data protection but under what jurisdiction are you accounts being managed? Who both from a staffing point of view and a company point of view has access to the information? Are your locations, movements and habits being observed, monitored and assessed for other reasons - some of these may be purely for targeted marketing but others could be for more insidious purposes?

I have been critical in the past of individuals who post on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites with too much detail about where they are and what they are doing. Now we have services specifically designed to post and collect this information.

The simple fact of the matter is that people will leave themselves open because there are multiple, complicated options on the security settings page - will every user truly understand them all? And how do you know all of your "friends" are the only ones viewing your information? It could be that their accounts have been compromised or that you have mistakenly added a "friend" who isn't who you think it is.

My philosophy is this - whatever you share on the internet, even just to "friends" you should consider it public domain. Don't tell anyone anything, say you are or have been anywhere, or opine about something you wouldn't want your mother, your boss or the rest of the world to know! That way, you can protect yourself, your identity and your information.

Why Website Security is Important for Everyone

Most websites, whether owned by an individual, an organisation or a business, are never security tested. Many see it as an irrelevant or unjustified expense, citing the fact that it's mainly static content, there's no sensitive information held on the site, it doesn't accept financial transactions, etc., so there's no point in potentially expensive web security testing, as the business or organisation can't be affected by insecurities.

Well, to put it simply, this is not true!

Whilst your website might not contain sensitive information, might not  accept any financial or personal transactions, and may be purely static content, you are still putting your clients and website visitors at risk.

Cyber criminals, of which there are many, are not necessarily interested in gaining access to your business and its information – although you are always a likely target – but they ARE after your customers. They want access to their computers and their details and they can use the vulnerabilities in your website to get that access.

More and more often, we are seeing ordinary websites used to load malicious software onto the computers of unsuspecting victims. Cyber criminals are scanning the internet, looking for any websites which are insecure and are loading them with malicious software (called 'malware'). This in turn is then passed on to the computers of every visitor to your site in what is known as a "drive by attack", exposing them to all kinds of issues such as identity theft, bank account skimming and credit card fraud.

So whilst your organisation may not be affected directly by your website security problems, there is a huge amount of damage that can be inflicted on your customers and passing visitors, for which you are at least partly to blame.

This has now reached a point in the US where victims of such incidents are taking the website owners to court for compensation. And whilst this may not be likely to happen in the UK or elsewhere, there is certainly the potential for it, particularly where an incident can be traced back to a specific website.

If every person who merely looked at your premises was in danger of some injury, you would rightly take steps to prevent it. So why wouldn't you take such a course of action in the virtual world of the internet, where such damage can be just as serious?

Information Security for SMEs

If you run a small or medium sized enterprise, then you’re probably up to your eyes in government red-tape, and legal and regulatory obligations, and that’s before you start to actually run and operate your business in order to make a living.

A key component in the smooth running of your business is information. That information may take on many forms – customer or supplier details, financial data or secret recipes for the perfect carrot cake – whatever it is, it is vital to your organisation. As such you need to make sure it is protected, kept from your competitors, guarded against public disclosure and available as and when you need it.

This is why good information security management and practices are as important to you as they are to the ‘big boys’. The major banks and corporations employ dedicated staff to manage their information security risks. You probably don’t have that luxury, but you still need someone to take responsibility for information security.

At this point, many SME managers and business owners claim they don’t have the time for information security, they don’t have the resources, it isn’t important to them, or they can’t afford it. After all, you’re only a small business, your IT people take care of that side of things, and you’re not at risk.

The information and data you use on a daily basis is the lifeblood of your business. Can you imagine if you had none of it? If one day you turned up at the office and all of your paperwork was blank? All of your computers had been wiped? Where would that leave you?

But it isn’t just the total loss of information that is of concern in the modern world. Criminals, including the so-caller ‘cyber’ criminals, want your information and my information. They want personal and financial details from as many people as they can for a variety of reasons, including identity theft. Even corporate data is now a target for the unscrupulous members of society.

So how would your company survive, particularly in the current economic climate, if it was discovered that your customers’ bank accounts were being drained, that identity thieves had access to personal data that could only have come from your business?

Apart from the obvious, potentially fatal, legal and regulatory fines, a well publicised incident of this nature would have a disastrous effect on your brand and business reputation. Even accidental disclosure of sensitive personal information is jumped on by the press, and that is without any direct criminal involvement.

If you hold personal information relating to living individuals, you fall under the jurisdiction of the Data Protection Act (DPA), if you handle financial information for individuals or other businesses you are very likely regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), and if you handle credit and debit card payments you will almost certainly have to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). All of these mean you must adhere to minimum standards for information security for regulatory and/or legal reasons.

At the end of the day, information security is as important to SMEs as it is to anyone, so the question isn’t really “why do you need to worry about information security?” but “can you afford NOT to worry about information security?”

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Why information security is NOT just an IT issue

Time and again, when I talk to business owners and managers about information security, I get the line "that's an IT issue" or "our IT guys look after that".

Whilst I'm well aware that IT and IT security plays a significant role in information security, it is not the Holy Grail many people seem to think it is.

IT is not some kind of magic wand you wave over your information assets to suddenly make them secure. The careful and appropriate use of IT solutions aids information security, but it is not a way of enforcing information security in its own right. Think of IT as a method of securing your information and data whilst it's being used or accessed electronically. That's all IT can ever hope to do.

But, by making information security an IT issue, many senior managers feel they have done their duty, and allocated it to someone who can deal with it. The problem here is that without senior management buy-in, and a top-down culture of security and security awareness among non-IT staff, the 'IT Crowd' can only achieve so much.

Often, IT security controls and processes, implemented without the understanding and support of non-IT staff, will be circumvented. If staff feel that IT is getting in their way, they will do everything they can to work around it or subvert the  controls. This is how we end up with users sharing logins and passwords, or documents being emailed to large groups of people because "So-and-so can't access them".

It is also worth remembering that not all information within a business falls under the control of electronic or IT systems. Almost every business in every industry will have printouts or hard-copies of documents, files and folders, and hand written notes, much of which contains business critical or at least business  important information – otherwise, why would it be there?

To successfully implement an information security programme, managers and business owners need to take ownership themselves. They need to be involved in defining the policies and procedures. Then they need to involve their staff in the process and educate them as to WHY they need to adhere to the policies, HOW to do it and WHAT the consequences will be if the processes and controls are not followed. They can then use the available IT solutions to assist with implementing the controls defined by the policies, whilst also ensuring that all staff are informed and educated as to why they are needed.

Information security is NOT an IT issue, but done properly IT can help you achieve your information security aims. You just need to make sure you've defined your business objectives beforehand, and educated your staff along the way.

Testing Data

Does your organisation develop software in house? Are you responsible for testing applications? Are you a tester of applications? If so, where do you get your test data? You know, the data you put in the databases that allow you to test the applications, where does it come from?

If the answer is from the live databases then you could be in trouble. Yes, you personally.

Many organisations, both large and small, take cuts of live data to use for testing purposes. Indeed, this is often seen as a good way of generating the test data required to fully exercise the application code. But is it?

There’s no argument that it’s as close to ‘live’ as possible because it is live, but do you do anything with the data before you place it in your development and test databases? Do you sanitise or obfuscate personal or sensitive fields? Do you restrict access to properly vetted and checked staff? If not you could be in breach of the law or regulatory conventions governing your organisation.

In the UK, personal information stored electronically comes under the Data Protection Act. Any such data collected can only be used for the purposes it was collected for. If ‘testing our application’ is not included in the official purposes, then raw personal data taken from the live databases and used for testing is almost certainly done so in breach of the DPA.

In addition to the DPA, which covers personal data held on individuals, there are other good reasons for not taking live data, unaltered. These could be regulatory or compliance related, including FSA, PCI, or any other governing regulations.

But it’s not just about the rules and regulations. It’s just really bad practice. If all you’re doing is testing your application against known, good data, then you’re not properly exercising your code. You’re not performing thorough data and error handling tests. Part of application testing is ensuring the code handles the unexpected in a predictable and safe manner. If you don’t test with data that stretches your code, how do you know what your application will do should it come across such data? 

So what should you do? How should you populate your test data?

This is where it gets interesting. These are good and valid questions, and there is no easy answer. The simple fact is that you are going to have to spend some time and effort on this problem. Test data needs to be created or generated and it needs to be good for testing. Taking a cut of live data and performing careful and thorough obfuscation is obviously one way of doing things. It needs to be done carefully though, as sensitive data may not be immediately apparent, for example, some free-form fields may contain sensitive data even after obfuscation. It’s also no good just populating the database with meaningless random data, as the testers may not be able to tell if they have the right results.

So it’s likely that the only way to achieve meaningless but realistic test data is to take the time (and money) to generate it, utilising relevant resources (DBAs, testers, developers, data owners) to ensure it covers the testing requirements. This test data could then be stored, added to, modified and reused throughout the lifecycle and lifetime of the application. You could even set up a function to centrally manage and distribute test data for all your applications and data users, ensuring high quality, useful and valid test data is available when needed.

There are a number of tools on the market which can aid with this process. A simple Google search for “database test data generator” pulls up dozens of suitable products out of about 1.7m hits, so there are resources available.

At the end of the day it comes down to a conscious decision by your organisation. You can either continue using live data for testing purposes in the hope that no security breach will occur, and that your breaking of the law or regulatory policies won’t be discovered, or you can stop cutting corners and take the time and effort to correct the situation.

Remember, ignorance of the law is not a defence under the law.

Article reproduced with kind permission of Pentest Limited - www.pentest.co.uk

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