Steps to take when there’s an active adversary

Archive for January, 2022

Steps to take when there’s an active adversary

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

CISOs know they must respond quickly and effectively to an incident, yet surveys point to continuing challenges to deliver on that goal. These steps will help you respond quickly, without letting a crisis turn into chaos.

Excerpt from: 12 steps to take when there’s an active adversary on your network

3. Bring in the business

CISOs should be looping in business during the triage process, security leaders say, a point that’s often overlooked during active responses. As part of this, security teams need to immediately identify what impacted components are critical for conducting business, who owns those components and who controls them.

As J. Wolfgang Goerlich, advisory CISO with Cisco Secure, says: “This is a business problem. But in a security breach, a very technical person will be thinking, ‘I have to remediate.’ However, one of the things that CISOs need to remember is that a breach is a business problem not a technical problem. So there should be a secondary process that’s running business continuity and disaster recovery so that the business can keep doing what it needs to be doing.”

12. Stay calm; tend to staff needs

Goerlich says he has seen teams “run themselves into the ground” by working long hours without breaks and even a day or more without sleep. Although that grueling schedule shows a level of dedication, it’s likely to lead to mistakes.

“People get into their zones and work well beyond the times that they should,” Goerlich says, noting that CISOs should plan for clear lines of communications, caps for work hours, staggered schedules, and post-event time off. He adds: “As much as possible, organizations should think out in advance how to handle the human elements.”

Read the full article: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3645690/12-steps-to-take-when-there-s-an-active-adversary-on-your-network.html

This post is an excerpt from a press article. To see other media mentions and press coverage, click to view the Media page or the News category. Do you want to interview Wolf for a similar article? Contact Wolf through his media request form.

Always On Podcast: Secure and Trusted Access at Scale

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

I was a guest recently on the Always On Podcast.

“The past year has brought about an enormous shift in how we work which has led to security issues on a much broader scale. On this episode of Always On, Wolfgang Goerlich from Duo joins me to discuss how organizations are handling secure access and deploying trusted access at scale. You won’t want to miss our review of a secure outcome study, so press play to listen.”

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in…

  • Trusted access [1:22]
  • The challenges that customers are seeing with the remote workforce [4:18]
  • Learning what Duo can do for an organization [9:45]
  • Improving the user experience [18:50]
  • Intangibles that customers are getting from Duo [25:04]
  • The outcomes of a secure outcome study [30:18]

Have a listen here: https://nwncarousel.com/podcast/secure-and-trusted-access-at-scale/

To see listen to other podcast interviews, click to view the Podcasts page or the Podcasts category.

 

Identify improvements as security matures – Design Monday

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

In writing the book Rethinking Sitting, Peter Opsvik manages to do with chairs what we should do with cyber security: study the item in the wider context of how people interact.

Peter Opsvik’s critique is that furniture design isn’t “particularly concerned with the needs of the sitting human body.” Many rituals, he believed, are driven by a need to relieve people and compensate for poor seats; like kneeling to pray or standing to sing. Opsvik considered how the positioning of a chair, say in a kitchen or dining area, can make a person feel more or less connected, more or less important. He also spent considerable time thinking about how sitting changes as children grow into adults.

Design spans time frames: an experience lasting an hour, a stage in life lasting years, a lifetime. It spans contexts: personal, communal, societal.

We struggle with this in cyber security. Take, for example, break glass account. Right then. We setup an account with administrative-level access, write the password on an envelope, and stuff the envelop in a vault. But what happens when most administrators are working remotely? Fair point. Let’s move the password from a physical vault to a password vault, and share the vault with our backup person. But what happens when the vault goes down? How about when the person resigns and leaves for another company? How do we handle the longer lifecycle of this seemingly simple control?

Peter Opsvik’s answer to the lifecycle question is the Tripp Trapp chair. The chair is well-made, long-lasting, and stable. Simply change the seat and footrest, and the chair accommodates the user from infancy to adult. Five sets of adjustments as they mature.

The chair reminds me of the five stage maturity models. Security capabilities move from initial, repeatable, defined, capable, and finally, to optimized. To design a Tripp Trapp security control, think through how to reconfigure the control to support the evolving capability. Ideally, simplify these adjustments down to a small number of items.

What’s the seat and footrest in our break glass example? I suggest the credential storage and credential access. That is, how we set it up, and how the person handling the emergency breaks the glass.

Tripp-Trapp-Tresko is Norwegian for Tic-Tac-Toe. In the kids game, like chairs and like security, you succeed by thinking ahead. “The best sitting position,” Opsvik once said, “is always the next position.” Start with minimum viable security. Plan for future stages early, and identify the adjustments we can make. Good security controls support an evolving capability maturity.

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The Tripp Trapp Chair from Stokke.

This article is part of a series on designing cyber security capabilities. To see other articles in the series, including a full list of design principles, click here.