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A Very Revealing Statement by the PCI Council

Rich February 27, 2009 10 Comments

I was getting a little excited when I read this article over at NetworkWorld about how the PCI council will be releasing a prioritized roadmap for companies facing compliance. It’s a great idea- instead of flogging companies with a massive list of security controls, it will prioritize those controls and list specific milestones. Now before I get to the fun part, I want to quote myself from one of my posts on PCI: Going back to CardSystems, a large majority of major breaches involve companies that were PCI compliant, including (probably) Hannaford. TJX is an open question. In many cases, the companies involved were certified but found to be non-compliant after the breach, which indicates a severe breakdown in the certification process. Now on to the fun (emphasis added by moi): Businesses that are compliant with PCI standards have never been breached, says Bob Russo, general manager of the PCI Security Standards Council, or at least he’s never seen such a case. Victims may have attained compliance certification at some point, he says, but none has been in compliance at the time of a breach, he says. What a load of shit. With the volume of breaches we’ve seen, this either means the standard and certification process are fundamentally broken, or companies have had their certifications retroactively revoked for political reasons after the fact. As I keep saying, PCI is really about protecting the card companies first, with as little cost to them as possible, and everyone else comes a distant second. It could be better, and the PCI Council has the power to make it so, but only if the process is fixed with more accountability of assessors, a revised assessment/audit process (not annual), a change to real end-to-end encryption, and a real R&D effort to fix the fundamental flaws in the system, instead of layering on patches that can never completely work. You could also nominate me for the PCI Council Board of Advisors. I’m sure that would be all sorts of fun. Seriously – we can fix this thing, but only by fixing the core of the program, not by layering on more controls and requirements. Share:

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Netezza Buys Tizor

Adrian Lane February 27, 2009 2 Comments

While both Rich and I predicted this would happen, I admit I am still slightly surprised: Netezza has acquired Tizor for $3.1M in cash. Netezza press release here, and While I do not see a press release issued from either vendor xconomy has the story here. Surprising in the sense that I would not have expected a data warehousing vendor to acquire a database monitoring & auditing company. My guess is it’s the auto-discovery features that most interest them. But like many companies that provide data management and analysis, Netezza may be finding that their customers are asking for security and even compliance facilities around the data they manage. In that case, this move could really pay off. I am certain that they were hoping for more, but $3M in cash is a pretty good return for their investors given the current market conditions and competitiveness in the DAM market. While it is my personal opinion, I have never considered the Tizor technology a class leading product. It took them a very long time to adapt the network monitoring appliance into a competitive product that met market demand. Their audit offering was not endorsed by companies I know who have evaluated the technology. They had some smart people over there, but like many of the DAM competitors, they have struggled to understand the customer buying center and have lacked the laser focus vision of some of the vendors like Guardium have demonstrated . But they have made consistent upgrades to the product and the auto-discovery option last year was a very smart move. All in all, Netezza is getting value, and the Tizor investors about $3M more than they would have gotten a few months from now. I have to admit that my timing of these events has been wrong … I thought that this transaction would have happened at/by the end of last year, and I am waiting for more still. But the DAM vendors who are not profitable have a huge problem that move to quickly and you kill your value. Move too slowly and you are out of business. Sometimes the due diligence process takes a while. Check back later as I will update the post as I hear more, of if Rich weighs in on this subject. Share:

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