Research

Oh yeah. I’m back in the ATL after a week at the RSA Conference. Aside from severe sleep deprivation, major liver damage, and some con flu… I’m feeling great. It seems everyone else is as well. Something appeared at RSA that we haven’t seen for at least 3 years: smiles. Which I guess is to be expected, since in 2009 and 2010 everyone walked around with hard hats, expecting the sky to fall. In 2011 there were some positive signs but still a lot of skepticism, which was gone this year. Almost everyone I talked to was very optimistic for 2012 and beyond. As a contrarian, my first instinct was that we must be breathing our own exhaust. You point to two other guys and they say they are optimistic, and then it becomes the perception of optimism, rather than optimism you can pay your mortgage with. But even when challenged, everyone felt pretty good. Even the tools felt sexy. It didn’t help their hygiene much, but you can’t expect the world to change overnight, can you? But to be clear, the idea of Bringing Sexy back (to Security) is not mine. But someone said it to me when I was in a drunken haze. I thought it was Rich, but he wouldn’t acknowledge it. So if you were the one who said it to me, thanks. It’s a great assessment of where we are at, after years in the compliance-driven darkness. Pendulum Swinging back to Security Speaking of compliance, overt messaging around our least-favorite C word was pretty muted at the show this year. PCI is old news. HiTech enforcement is an unknown quantity, and for the most part unless an organization has been sleeping for the past 7 years they should be in decent shape regarding the low bar that a compliance mandate represents. Now actually securing something? That’s entirely different, and as such, the pendulum clearly swung back toward more of a security message on the floor this year. Which should warm the hearts of all you security folks nauseated at the game we have had to play to get our security projects paid for out of the compliance budget. So when you do next year’s holiday cards, send one to the Red Army and probably Anonymous. By then you’d expect both organizations to be Doxed, so you may even have an address. And they both probably own the USPS, so they can get their own mail as well, if they care to… Kidding aside, between high profile targeted attacks and chaotic actors, it is now clear to most organizations that PCI isn’t good enough. And that means we need to start talking about security again. Also be thankful that we’ve seen innovation in perimeter security gear (think NGFW), as well. Given the number of depreciated firewalls awaiting something interesting to drive a perimeter security renewal/re-architecture, having NGFW gear reach stability created a wave of buying that has also driven many of the public security companies. Those that HP and IBM haven’t overpaid for yet, anyway. Honestly, it was great to actually talk security this week, and not weird funding strategies. Really great. BigData Hype did not disappoint As we highlighted in the RSA Guide 2012, it has been obvious that BigData would be a big theme at the show. And it was. I ran into Joe Yeager from Lancope on my flight home and he joked to me that we should sell Powered by Hadoop stickers for $20K each. Given that every company needs to jump onto the BigData bandwagon, Joe is exactly right. Those would fly off the shelf. Apparently the marketers still haven’t figured out the difference between BigData and a lot of data, but that’s okay. Hyperbole rules the trade show floor (and some booth babes shaking their things), so it’s all good. But I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of BigData at security conferences for the foreseeable future. Cloud still prominent It was also all cloud, all the time, at RSA this year. Again, not a surprise and probably justified. Though there was a lot more SECaaS (SECurity as a Service), than actual cloud security. I’m sure Rich will want to expand on this a bit at some point, but we saw plenty of folks talking about encrypting data in the cloud, along with lots of focus on managing cloud instances and the security of those instances. And all that is great to see. Real innovation is happening in this space, and not a second too soon – folks are doing this cloud thing, and we need to figure out how to protect that stuff. Yes, we saw a bunch of cloud washing, especially from the network security folks, who made a big deal about their VM instances that can run in the cloud. After hearing for years about how their hardware prowess makes their boxes great, it was kind of funny to hear them talk about how their stuff runs great in the cloud, but whatever. It’s a bandwagon and RSA requires you to jump aboard or get left behind. Good vibrations on BYOD The other area that we expected to hear a lot about was mobile security, specifically this BYOD stuff. At the e10+ session on Monday morning we did an entire section on BYOD and it spurred a great discussion. Here are some takeaways: iOS is cool, Android is not, and BlackBerry is dead: That’s not to say BlackBerry is gone, but it’s just a matter of time, as almost everyone in the room was migrating to another platform. It’s also not that Android isn’t showing up on corporate networks – it is, but with caveats. We’ll get to that. iOS is generally accepted as okay, mostly because of the way the App Store screens applications prior to availability. Everyone has policies. Most are not enforced. We spent a good portion of the session talking about policies, and everyone agreed that documenting policies is critical. Though enforcement of these policies is clearly lagging, especially for senior folks. But any employee seems to know

I owe a tremendous amount to social media. I wasn’t early to either blogging or Twitter (as my friends remind me), but once I got there a whole new world of opportunities opened. I created a boutique business (Security Incite) on the back of a blog and email newsletter. I met so many great people – many of whom became close friends – and even found a business partner or two. But the edge of social media cuts both ways. ‘News’ organizations have emerged with, uh, distinctly unjournalistic methods of handling conflicts of interest. You need to read Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool by Dan Lyons, about the unholy alliance between some very high-profile tech bloggers and what they publish about companies they invest in. You sort of knew that stuff was going on, but to see it laid bare was eye-opening. To be fair, none of these guys hide their investments in the companies they write about. Or that they leverage their audience to build brand and buzz for the chosen few who take their investment. Or that they strong-arm those that won’t or don’t. If you look hard enough you certainly can find the truth, but they certainly don’t publicize it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m idealistic. Maybe I don’t understand how the world works. But that just seems wrong on so many levels. I guess I’m one of those guys that believes objectivity matters. Listen – we all have biases. I’m no Pollyanna, thinking anyone can truly be unbiased. But we at Securosis are pretty up front about our biases. And none of those biases are economic in nature. None. One of the things that really attracted me to the business model Rich built was the Totally Transparent Research method. We do the work. We write what needs to be written. When we are done, and only then, do we license content for sponsorship. We do line up sponsors ahead of time, but we only offer a right of first refusal, and either party can walk away at any time. We have. And sponsors have. We cannot afford to be beholden to someone, to write what they want, because we already took a down payment on our integrity. By the way, this model sucks for cash flow. We do all the work. We take all the risk. Then we hope the sponsors still have the budget and inclination to license the content. I can’t pay my mortgage with a right of first refusal. But objectivity matters to us, and we don’t see any other way to write credible research. Many folks who blog and tweet a lot about security will be out at the RSA Conference this week. You’ll likely be hearing about all sorts of shiny new objects. This one shinier than the next. But take every blog post and tweet with a grain of salt – even ours! The Internet can provide a wealth of information to help organizations make critical decisions, but it contains a tremendous amount of disinformation. Buyer beware – always. Understand who is writing what. Understand their biases and keep their point of view in mind. Most important: use all this information to get smarter and to zero in on the right questions to ask the right people. If you make buying decisions based on a blog post or a magic chart or anything other than your own research, then you (with all due respect) are an idiot. Share:

Managing DLP tends to not be overly time consuming unless you are running off badly defined policies. Most of your time in the system is spent on incident handling, followed by policy management. To give you some numbers, the average organization can expect to need about the equivalent of one full time person for every 10,000 monitored employees. This is really just a rough starting point – we’ve seen ratios as low as 1/25,000 and as high as 1/1000 depending on the nature and number of policies. Managing Incidents After deployment of the product and your initial policy set you will likely need fewer people to manage incidents. Even as you add policies you might not need additional people since just having a DLP tool and managing incidents improves user education and reduces the number of incidents. Here is a typical process: Manage incident handling queue The incident handling queue is the user interface for managing incidents. This is where the incident handlers start their day, and it should have some key features: Ability to customize the incident for the individual handler. Some are more technical and want to see detailed IP addresses or machine names, while others focus on users and policies. Incidents should be pre-filtered based on the handler. In a larger organization this allows you to automatically assign incidents based on the type of policy, business unit involved, and so on. The handler should be able to sort and filter at will; especially to sort based on the type of policy or the severity of the incident (usually the number of violations – e.g. a million account numbers in a file versus 5 numbers). Support for one-click dispositions to close, assign, or escalate incidents right from the queue as opposed to having to open them individually. Most organizations tend to distribute incident handling among a group of people as only part of their job. Incidents will be either automatically or manually routed around depending on the policy and the severity. Practically speaking, unless you are a large enterprise this cloud be a part-time responsibility for a single person, with some additional people in other departments like legal and human resources able to access the system or reports as needed for bigger incidents. Initial investigation Some incidents might be handled right from the initial incident queue; especially ones where a blocking action was triggered. But due to the nature of dealing with sensitive information there are plenty of alerts that will require at least a little initial investigation. Most DLP tools provide all the initial information you need when you drill down on a single incident. This may even include the email or file involved with the policy violations highlighted in the text. The job of the handler is to determine if this is a real incident, the severity, and how to handle. Useful information at this point is a history of other violations by that user and other violations of that policy. This helps you determine if there is a bigger issue/trend. Technical details will help you reconstruct more of what actually happened, and all of this should be available on a single screen to reduce the amount of effort needed to find the information you need. If the handler works for the security team, he or she can also dig into other data sources if needed, such as a SIEM or firewall logs. This isn’t something you should have to do often. Initial disposition Based on the initial investigation the handler closes the incident, assigns it to someone else, escalates to a higher authority, or marks it for a deeper investigation. Escalation and Case Management Anyone who deploys DLP will eventually find incidents that require a deeper investigation and escalation. And by “eventually” we mean “within hours” for some of you. DLP, by it’s nature, will find problems that require investigating your own employees. That’s why we emphasize having a good incident handling process from the start since these cases might lead to someone being fired. When you escalate, consider involving legal and human resources. Many DLP tools include case management features so you can upload supporting documentation and produce needed reports, plus track your investigative activities. Close The last (incredibly obvious) step is to close the incident. You’ll need to determine a retention policy and if your DLP tool doesn’t support retention needs you can always output a report with all the salient incident details. As with a lot of what we’ve discusses you’ll probably handle most incidents within minutes (or less) in the DLP tool, but we’ve detailed a common process for those times you need to dig in deeper. Archive Most DLP systems keep old incidents in the database, which will obviously fill it up over time. Periodically archiving old incidents (such as anything 1 year or older) is a good practice, especially since you might need to restore the records as part of a future investigation. Managing Policies Anytime you look at adding a significant new policy you should follow the Full Deployment process we described above, but there are still a lot of day to day policy maintenance activities. These tend not to take up a lot of time, but if you skip them for too long you might find your policy set getting stale and either not offering enough security, or causing other issues due to being out of date. Policy distribution If you manage multiple DLP components or regions you will need to ensure policies are properly distributed and tuned for the destination environment. If you distribute policies across national boundaries this is especially important since there might be legal considerations that mandate adjusting the policy. This includes any changes to policies. For example, if you adjust a US-centric policy that’s been adapted to other regions, you’ll then need to update those regional policies to maintain consistency. If you manage remote offices with their own network connections you want to make sure policy updates pushed out properly and are

We’ve renamed this section from “Virtualization and Cloud Security” to simply “Cloud Security” since if you listen to any of the marketing messages, you can’t tell the difference, even though it’s a big one. And virtualization is a hassle to type, so buh bye! Overall, as we mentioned in the key themes post, cloud security will be one of the biggest trends to watch during the conference and it also happens to be one area where you should focus since there is some real innovation, and you probably have real problems that need some help. New Kids on the Cloud Security Block (NKOTCSB) Hiding in the corners will be some smaller vendors you need to pay attention to. Instead of building off existing security tools designed for traditional infrastructure (we’re looking at you Big Security), they’ve created new products built from the ground up specifically for the cloud. Each of them focuses on a different cloud computing problem that’s hard to manage using existing tools – identity management (federated identity gateways), instance security, encryption, and administrative access. Many of these have a SaaS component, but if you corner them in a back room and have enough cash they’ll usually sell you a stand-alone server you can manage yourself. NKOTCSB FTW. Cloudwashing vs. the Extreme Cloud Makeover If you haven’t heard the term before, “cloudwashing” refers to making a virtual appliance of a product ready to run on Amazon Web Services, VMWare, or some other cloud platform without really changing much in the product. This is especially amusing when it comes from vendors who spent years touting their special hardware secret sauce for their physical appliance. Consider these transitional products, typically better suited for private cloud IaaS. It might help, but in the long run you really need to focus on cloud-specific security controls. But some vendors are pushing deeper and truly adapting for cloud computing. It might be better use of cloud APIs, redesigning software to use a cloud architectural model, or extending an existing product to address a cloud-specific security issue that’s otherwise not covered. The best way to sniff the cloudwashing shampoo is to see if there are any differences between the traditional product and the virtual appliance version. Then ask, “do you use the //cloud platform// APIs or offer any new APIs in the product?” and see if their faces melt. Virtual Private Data We also cover this one in the data security post so we won’t go into much more detail here, but suffice it to say data security is pretty high on the list of things people moving to the cloud need to look at. Most encryption vendors are starting to support cloud computing with agents that run on cloud platforms as an extension of their to their existing management systems (thus requiring a hybrid model), but a couple are more cloud-specific and can deploy stand-alone in public cloud. CloudOps Most of the practical cloud-specific security, especially for Infrastructure as a Service comes from the (relatively) new group of cloud management vendors. Some might be at RSA, but not all of them since they sell to data center operations teams, not CISOs. Why? Well, it just might be the big wads of cash that Ops teams have in comparison. Keep an eye on these folks because aside from helping with configuration management automation, some are adding additional features like CloudAudit support, data protection/encryption, and network security (implemented on a virtualized host). While the NKOTCSB are totally focused on security innovation, the management and operations platforms concentrate on cloud operational innovation, which obviously has a big security component. We’ll be posting the assembled guide within the next day or so, so you’ll have it in plenty of time for your pilgrimage to San Francisco. Share:

It’s here. No, not the new iPad. Not those test results. And most definitely not that other thing you were thinking about. We’re talking about RSA. And for the majority of you who don’t run to the Moscone Center every February or March, you may not care. But love it or hate it, the RSA Conference is the main event for our industry, and a whole lot of things get tied up with it that have nothing to do with sessions and panels. Our friends Josh Corman and Andrew Hay have written up their survival guides, and after this preamble I’m going to link you to our 2012 Securosis Guide to RSA with an insane amount of information in it, much of which has more to do with what you will see in our industry over the next 12 months than with the conference itself. The RSA Conference is the World Series of Security Insider Baseball. The truth is most of you don’t need to care about any of that stuff. Sure, a lot of people will be on Twitter talking about parties and the hallway track, but that’s all a bunch of crap. They’re fun, and I enjoy seeing my friends, but none of it really matters if you are trying to keep the bad guys out. So here’s my advice for RSA 2012 – whether you attend or not: If you don’t go to RSA there are still important things you can pick up. A lot of the better presentations end up online and many vendors release major updates of products you might have… or at least announce their strategies. Even the marketing fluff can be useful, by giving you an idea of what’s coming over the next year (or two – shipping dates always slip). The hallway track is for social butterflies and business development – not security professionals. Not all sessions are of the same quality, but there is plenty of good content, and you are better served checking out product demos or finding some of the better presentations. Skip most of the panels. If it starts with bios that last more than a few lines, walk out. If any panelist tries to show their own slides rather than the preset decks RSA requires, walk faster. Not all vendor presentations suck, but many of them do. Given a choice, try to find end users talking about something they’ve done in the real world. If a presentation description starts with “we will examine the risks of…” skip it. You don’t need more FUD. Most presentations on policies and governance also suck. But as a techie I’m biased. Ignore the party scene. Yes, the parties can be fun and I enjoy hanging out with my friends, but that’s because I have a lot of people I consider real friends who are scattered across the world and work for different companies. If you aren’t tied into that social group, or roaming with a pack of friends, you are drinking alone in a room full of strangers. It wouldn’t bother me one bit if most of the parties stopped and I could have a few quiet dinners with people I enjoy chatting with. Use the expo floor. You will never have an opportunity to see so many product demos. Never sit in one of the mini-auditoriums with a hired actor giving a pitch – seek out the engineers hovering by the demo stations. You can learn a hell of a lot very quickly there. Get rid of the sales guy by asking a very technical question, and he or she will usually find the person you can dig in with. Never let anyone scan your badge unless you want the sales call – which you may. You are there to work. I’m there to work. Even at the social events I tend to moderate so I can function well the next day. I won’t say I’m perfect, but I can’t afford to sleep in past 6:30 or 7am or take a break during the day. Go to sessions. Talk to vendors. Have meetings. You’re there for that, nothing else. The rest is what Defcon is for 🙂 It’s really easy to be turned off by a combination of all the insider garbage you see on blogs like ours and the insanity of car giveaways on the show floor. But peel the superficial layers off and you have a show floor full of engineers, sessions full of security pros working every day to keep the bad guys out, and maybe even a self-described expert spouting random advice and buying you a free breakfast… or three. -Rich On to the Summary: Where to see us at the RSA Conference We keep busy schedules at RSA each year. But the good news is that we do a number of speaking sessions and make other appearances throughout the week. Here is where you can find us: Speaking Sessions DAS-108: Big Data and Security: Rich (Tuesday, Feb 28, 12:30pm) EXP-304: Grilling Cloudicorns: Rich (Thursday, March 1, 12:45pm) Flash Talks Powered by PechaKucha Mike will be presenting “A Day in the Life of a CISO, as told by Shakespeare” (Thursday, March 1, 5:30pm) Other Events e10+: Rich, Mike, and Adrian are the hosts and facilitators of the RSA Conference’s e10+ program, targeting CISO types. That’s Monday (Feb 27) from 8:30am until noon. America’s Growth Capital Conference: Mike will be moderating a panel at the AGC Conference on cloud management and security with folks from Afore Solutions, CipherCloud, Dome9, HyTrust, and Verizon. The session is Monday afternoon, Feb 27 at 2:15pm. And the 2012 Disaster Recovery Breakfast. Don’t forget to download the entire Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference 2012. Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences The RSA Network Security Podcast. Other Securosis Posts Implementing DLP: Ongoing Management. Implementing DLP: Deploy. Implementing DLP: Deploying Storage and Endpoint. RSA Conference 2012 Guide: Cloud Security. RSA Conference 2012 Guide: Data Security. RSA Conference 2012 Guide: Security Management and Compliance. RSA Conference 2012 Guide: Email & Web Security. RSA Conference Guide 2012:

Managing DLP tends to not be overly time consuming unless you are running off badly defined policies. Most of your time in the system is spent on incident handling, followed by policy management. To give you some numbers, the average organization can expect to need about the equivalent of one full time person for every 10,000 monitored employees. This is really just a rough starting point – we’ve seen ratios as low as 1/25,000 and as high as 1/1000 depending on the nature and number of policies. Managing Incidents After deployment of the product and your initial policy set you will likely need fewer people to manage incidents. Even as you add policies you might not need additional people since just having a DLP tool and managing incidents improves user education and reduces the number of incidents. Here is a typical process: Manage incident handling queue The incident handling queue is the user interface for managing incidents. This is where the incident handlers start their day, and it should have some key features: Ability to customize the incident for the individual handler. Some are more technical and want to see detailed IP addresses or machine names, while others focus on users and policies. Incidents should be pre-filtered based on the handler. In a larger organization this allows you to automatically assign incidents based on the type of policy, business unit involved, and so on. The handler should be able to sort and filter at will; especially to sort based on the type of policy or the severity of the incident (usually the number of violations – e.g. a million account numbers in a file versus 5 numbers). Support for one-click dispositions to close, assign, or escalate incidents right from the queue as opposed to having to open them individually. Most organizations tend to distribute incident handling among a group of people as only part of their job. Incidents will be either automatically or manually routed around depending on the policy and the severity. Practically speaking, unless you are a large enterprise this cloud be a part-time responsibility for a single person, with some additional people in other departments like legal and human resources able to access the system or reports as needed for bigger incidents. Initial investigation Some incidents might be handled right from the initial incident queue; especially ones where a blocking action was triggered. But due to the nature of dealing with sensitive information there are plenty of alerts that will require at least a little initial investigation. Most DLP tools provide all the initial information you need when you drill down on a single incident. This may even include the email or file involved with the policy violations highlighted in the text. The job of the handler is to determine if this is a real incident, the severity, and how to handle. Useful information at this point is a history of other violations by that user and other violations of that policy. This helps you determine if there is a bigger issue/trend. Technical details will help you reconstruct more of what actually happened, and all of this should be available on a single screen to reduce the amount of effort needed to find the information you need. If the handler works for the security team, he or she can also dig into other data sources if needed, such as a SIEM or firewall logs. This isn’t something you should have to do often. Initial disposition Based on the initial investigation the handler closes the incident, assigns it to someone else, escalates to a higher authority, or marks it for a deeper investigation. Escalation and Case Management Anyone who deploys DLP will eventually find incidents that require a deeper investigation and escalation. And by “eventually” we mean “within hours” for some of you. DLP, by it’s nature, will find problems that require investigating your own employees. That’s why we emphasize having a good incident handling process from the start since these cases might lead to someone being fired. When you escalate, consider involving legal and human resources. Many DLP tools include case management features so you can upload supporting documentation and produce needed reports, plus track your investigative activities. Close The last (incredibly obvious) step is to close the incident. You’ll need to determine a retention policy and if your DLP tool doesn’t support retention needs you can always output a report with all the salient incident details. As with a lot of what we’ve discusses you’ll probably handle most incidents within minutes (or less) in the DLP tool, but we’ve detailed a common process for those times you need to dig in deeper. Archive Most DLP systems keep old incidents in the database, which will obviously fill it up over time. Periodically archiving old incidents (such as anything 1 year or older) is a good practice, especially since you might need to restore the records as part of a future investigation. Managing Policies Anytime you look at adding a significant new policy you should follow the Full Deployment process we described above, but there are still a lot of day to day policy maintenance activities. These tend not to take up a lot of time, but if you skip them for too long you might find your policy set getting stale and either not offering enough security, or causing other issues due to being out of date. Policy distribution If you manage multiple DLP components or regions you will need to ensure policies are properly distributed and tuned for the destination environment. If you distribute policies across national boundaries this is especially important since there might be legal considerations that mandate adjusting the policy. This includes any changes to policies. For example, if you adjust a US-centric policy that’s been adapted to other regions, you’ll then need to update those regional policies to maintain consistency. If you manage remote offices with their own network connections you want to make sure policy updates pushed out properly and are

Up until this point we’ve focused on all the preparatory work before you finally turn on the switch and start using your DLP tool in production. While it seems like a lot, in practice (assuming you know your priorities) you can usually be up and running with basic monitoring in a few days. With the pieces in place, now it’s time to configure and deploy policies to start your real monitoring and enforcement. Earlier we defined the differences between the Quick Wins and Full Deployment processes. The easy way to think about it is Quick Wins is more about information gathering and refining priorities and policies, while Full Deployment is all about enforcement. With the Full Deployment option you respond and investigate every incident and alert. With Quick Wins you focus more on the big picture. To review: The Quick Wins process is best for initial deployments. Your focus is on rapid deployment and information gathering vs. enforcement to help guide your full deployment. We previously detailed this process in a white paper and will only briefly review it in this series. The Full Deployment process is what you’ll use for the long haul. It’s a methodical series of steps for full enforcement policies. Since the goal is enforcement (even if enforcement is alert/response and not automated blocking/filtering) we spend more time tuning policies to produce desired results. We generally recommend you start with the Quick Wins process since it gives you a lot more information before jumping into a full deployment, and in some cases might realign your priorities based on what you find. No matter which approach you take it helps to follow the DLP Cycle. These are the four high-level phases of any DLP project: Define: Define the data or information you want to discover, monitor, and protect. Definition starts with a statement like “protect credit card numbers”, but then needs to be converted into a granular definition capable of being loaded into a DLP tool. Discover: Find the information in storage or on your network. Content discovery is determining where the defined data resides, while network discovery determines where it’s currently being moved around on the network, and endpoint discovery is like content discovery but on employee computers. Depending on your project priorities you will want to start with a surveillance project to figure out where things are and how they are being used. This phase may involve working with business units and users to change habits before you go into full enforcement mode. Monitor: Ongoing monitoring with policy violations generating incidents for investigation. In Discover you focus on what should be allowed and setting a baseline; in Monitor your start capturing incidents that deviate from that baseline. Protect: Instead of identifying and manually handling incidents you start implementing real-time automated enforcement, such as blocking network connections, automatically encrypting or quarantining emails, blocking files from moving to USB, or removing files from unapproved servers. Define Reports Before you jump into your deployment we suggest defining your initial report set. You’ll need these to show progress, demonstrate value, and communicate with other stakeholders. Here are a few starter ideas for reports: Compliance reports are a no brainer and are often included in the products. For example, showing you scanned all endpoints or servers for unencrypted credit card data could save significant time and resources by reducing scope for a PCI assessment. Since our policies are content based, reports showing violation types by policy help figure out what data is most at risk or most in use (depending on how you have your policies set). These are very useful to show management to align your other data security controls and education efforts. Incidents by business unit are another great tool, even if focused on a single policy, in helping identify hot spots. Trend reports are extremely valuable in showing the value of the tool and how well it helps with risk reduction. Most organizations we talk with who generate these reports see big reductions over time, especially when they notify employees of policy violations. Never underestimate the political value of a good report. Quick Wins Process We previously covered Quick Wins deployments in depth in a dedicated whitepaper, but here is the core of the process: The differences between a long-term DLP deployment and our “Quick Wins” approach are goals and scope. With a Full Deployment we focus on comprehensive monitoring and protection of very specific data types. We know what we want to protect (at a granular level) and how we want to protect it, and we can focus on comprehensive policies with low false positives and a robust workflow. Every policy violation is reviewed to determine if it’s an incident that requires a response. In the Quick Wins approach we are concerned less about incident management, and more about gaining a rapid understanding of how information is used within our organization. There are two flavors to this approach – one where we focus on a narrow data type, typically as an early step in a full enforcement process or to support a compliance need, and the other where we cast a wide net to help us understand general data usage to prioritize our efforts. Long-term deployments and Quick Wins are not mutually exclusive – each targets a different goal and both can run concurrently or sequentially, depending on your resources. Remember: even though we aren’t talking about a full enforcement process, it is absolutely essential that your incident management workflow be ready to go when you encounter violations that demand immediate action! Choose Your Flavor The first step is to decide which of two general approaches to take: * Single Type: In some organizations the primary driver behind the DLP deployment is protection of a single data type, often due to compliance requirements. This approach focuses only on that data type. * Information Usage: This approach casts a wide net to help characterize how the organization uses information, and identify patterns of both legitimate use and abuse. This information is often very useful for prioritizing and informing additional data security efforts. Choose

In the the last twelve months we’ve witnessed the highest rates of data theft disclosures since the record setting year of 2008 (including, for the first time in public, Rich’s credit card). So predictably there will be plenty of FUD balloons flying at this year’s conference. From Anonymous to the never-ending Wikileaks fallout and cloud fears, there is no shortage of chatter about data security (or “data governance” for people who prefer to write about protecting stuff instead of actually protecting it). Guess Mr. Market is deciding what’s really important, and it usually aligns with the headlines of the week. But you know us, we still think Data Security is pretty critial and all this attention is actually starting to drive things in a positive direction, as opposed to the days of thinking data security meant SSL + email filtering. Here are five areas of interest at the show for data security: Da Cloud and Virtual Private Storage The top two issues we hear most organizations cite when they are concerned about moving to cloud computing, especially public cloud, are data security and compliance. While we aren’t lawyers or auditors, we have a good idea how data security is playing out. The question shouldn’t be to move or not to move, but should be how to adopt cloud computing securely. The good news is you can often use your existing encryption and key management infrastructure to encrypt data and then store it in a public cloud. Novel, eh? We call it Virtual Private Storage, just as VPNs use encryption to protect communications over a public resource. Many enterprises want to take advantage of cheap (maybe) public cloud computing resources, but compliance and security fears still hold them back. Some firms choose instead to build a private cloud using their own gear or request a private cloud from a public cloud provider (even Amazon will sell you dedicated racks… for a price). But the virtual private storage movement seems to be a hit with early adopters, with companies able to enjoy elastic cloud storage goodness, leveraging cloud storage cost economies instead of growing (and throwing money into) their SAN/NAS investment, and avoiding many of the security concerns inherent to multi-tenant environments. Amazon AWS quietly productized a solution for this a few months back, making it even easier to get your data into their cloud, securely. Plus most encryption and key management vendors have basic IaaS support in current products for private and hybrid clouds, with some better public cloud coverage on the way. Big is the New Big The machine is hungry – must feed the machine! Smart phones sending app data and geolocation data, discreet marketing spyware and web site tracking tools are generating a mass of consumer data increasingly stored in big data and NoSQL databases for analysis, never mind all the enterprises linking together previously-disparate data for analysis. There will be lots of noise about about Big Data and security at RSAC, but most of it is hype. Many security vendors don’t even realize Big Data refers to a specific set of technologies and not any large storage repository. Plus, a lot of the people collecting and using Big Data have no real interest in securing that data; only getting more data and pumping into more sophisticated analysis models. And most of the off-the-shelf security technologies won’t work in a Big Data environment or the endpoints where the data is collected. And let’s also not confuse Big Data from the user standpoint, which as described above, as massive analysis of sensitive business information, with Big Security Data. You’ll also hear a lot about more effectively analyzing the scads of security data collected, but that’s different. We discussed that a bit in our Key Themes section. Masking It’s a simple technology that scrambles data. It’s been around for many years and has been used widely to create safe test data from production databases. But the growth in this market over the last two years leads us to believe that masking vendors will have a bigger presence at the RSA show. No, not as big as firewalls, but these are definitely folks you should be looking at. Fueling the growth is the ability to effectively protect large complex data sets in a way that encryption and masking technologies have not. For example, encrypting a Hadoop cluster is usually neither feasible nor desirable. Second, the development of dynamic masking and ‘in place’ masking variants are easier to use than many ETL solutions. Expect to hear about masking from both big and small vendors during the show. We touched on this in the Compliance section as well. Big Brother and iOS Data Loss Prevention will still have a big presence this year both in terms of the dedicated tools and the DLP-Lite features being added to everything from your firewall to the Moscone beverage stations. But there are also new technologies keeping an eye on how users work with data- from Database Activity Monitoring (which we now call Database Security Platforms, and Gartner calls Database Audit and Protection), to File Activity Monitoring, to new endpoint and cloud-oriented tools. Also expect a lot of talk about protecting data from those evil iPhones and iPads. Breaking down the trend what we will see are more tools offering more monitoring in more places. Some of these will be content aware, while others will merely watch access patterns and activities. A key differentiator will be how well their analytics work, and how well they tie to directory servers to identify the real users behind what’s going on. This is more evolution than revolution, and be cautious with products that claim new data protection features but really haven’t added content analysis or other information-centric technology. As for iOS, Apple’s App Store restrictions are forcing the vendors to get creative. you’ll see a mix of folks doing little more than mobile device management, while others are focusing on really supporting mobility with well-designed portals and sandboxes that still allow the users to work on their devices. To

It’s a presidential election year here in the US, and that means the master spin meisters, manipulators, and liars politicians are out in full force. Normally I just tune out, wait for the primary season to end, and then figure out who I want to vote for. But I know better than to discuss either religion or politics with people I like. And that means you. So I’m not going to go there. But this election cycle is different for me, and it will be strange. I suspect I won’t be able to stay blissfully unaware until late summer because XX1 is old enough to understand what is going on. She watches some TV and will inevitably be exposed to political attack ads. It’s already happened. She’s very inquisitive, so I was a bit surprised when she asked if the President is a bad man. I made the connection right away and had to have a discussion about negative political ads, spin, and trying to find the truth somewhere in the middle. Your truth may be different than my truth. Fundamentally, totally different. But suffice it to say the venom that will be polluting our airwaves over the next 6 months is not close to anyone’s truth. It’s overt negativity (thanks, Karl Rove) and I have no doubt that once the Republican candidate is identified, the Democratic hounds will be unleashed against him. Notice I was male gender specific, but that’s another story for another day. I guess it must be idealistic Tuesday. Can’t the candidates have an honest, fact-based dialog about the issues? And let citizens make informed decisions instead of manipulating them with fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Funded by billionaires looking to make their next billions. Yeah, no shot of that. You see, I’m no pollyanna. I know that anyone actually trying to undertake a civil discourse would get crushed by the 24/7 media cycle and privately funded attack ads which twist their words anyway. We elect the most effective poop flinger here in the US, and it’s pretty sad. Lord knows, once they get elected they face 4 or 8 years of gridlock and then a lifetime of Secret Service protection. It’s one of those be careful what you wish for situations. But hey, everyone wants to be the most powerful person on the world for a while, right? Again, normally I ignore this stuff and stay focused on the only thing I can really control: my work ethic. But with impressionable young kids in the house we will need to discuss a lot of this crap, debunk obvious falsehoods, and try to educate the kids on the issues. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not easy either. Or I could enforce a media blackout until November 7. Now, that’s the ticket. -Mike Note: Next week is the RSA Conference, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to do much Inciting. So we’ll skip the Incite next week and perhaps provide a jumbo edition on March 7. Or maybe not… Photo credits: “Poop Here” originally uploaded by kraskland Heavy Research No holiday for us. We hammered you on the blog Monday, which many of you may have ignored. So here’s a list of the things we’ve posted to the Heavy Feed over the past week. Malware Analysis Quant Metrics – Define Rules and Search Queries Metrics – The Malware Profile Metrics – Dynamic Analysis Metrics – Static Analysis Metrics – Build Testbed Metrics – Confirm Infection Malware Analysis Quant: Take the Survey (and win fancy prizes!) We need your help to understand what you do (and what you don’t) in terms of malware analysis. And you can win some nice gift cards from Amazon for your trouble. RSA Conference 2012 Guide Security Management and Compliance Email & Web Security Endpoint Security Application Security Here’s the other stuff we’ve been up to: Understanding and Selecting DSP: Core Components. Featuring the Jack and the DSPeanstalk image. Check it out. Implementing DLP: Deploying Storage and Endpoint Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can access all our content in its unabridged glory. So check them out and (as always) please let us know what you think via comments. Incite 4 U It’s not about patching, it’s about web-scale architecture: It seems Rafal Los got his panties in a bunch when Mort threw out a thought balloon about shortening patch windows with smaller and more frequent patching. Though I think the term ‘patch’ here is what’s muddying the issue. Everyone realizes that most SaaS apps ‘patch’ whenever they need to with little downtime. At least if they are architected correctly. And that’s the point – I Mort as saying we need to really rethink application and deployment architectures to be more resilient and less dependent on huge patches/upgrades that can cause more problems than they fix. As LonerVamp points out, downtime is a hassle and more frequent patches are a pain in the backside. And for the way we currently do things, he’s right. But if we rethink architecture (which does take years), why wouldn’t we choose to fix things when they break, instead of when there are a bunch of other things to fix? – MR Political Deniability: I learned long ago to ignore all the cyberchatter coming out of Congress until they actually pass a bill and fund an enforcement body, and someone gets nailed with fines or jail time. How long have we been hearing about that national breach disclosure law that every vendor puts in their PowerPoint decks, despite, you know, not actually being a law? Si we can’t put too much stock in the latest National Cybersecurity Bill, but this one seems to have a chance, if the distinguished senior senator from my home state of Arizona doesn’t screw it up because he wasn’t consulted enough. Come on, man, grow up! The key element of this bill that I think could make a difference is that it’s the first attempt I’m aware of to waive liability for organizations so they can share cybersecurity information (breach data). That’s a common reason

As we continue with our tour through the RSA Conference, we’re in the home stretch. Today we’ll hit both security management and compliance, since the two are intrinsically linked. Security Management Security Management has been a dynamic and quickly evolving space that received a lot of attention at conference like RSA. Yet, we will probably see a little bit less visibility on the part of what we typically call security management (basically SIEM/Log Management) this year, because there will be fewer folks beating the drum for this technology. Why? That brings us to our first observation… I can haz your start-up Amazingly enough, the two highest profile SIEM/Log Management vendors were acquired on the same day last October. Q1Labs by IBM and Nitro Security by McAfee, which we wrote about in this post. This followed Big IT investing in the space over the previous few years (HP bought ArcSight in 2010 and RSA bought Network Intelligence in 2006 and Netwitness in earlier in 2011). So basically at the RSA show, you’ll see these security management platforms positioned clearly as the centerpiece of the security strategies of the Big security vendors. Cool, huh? The technology has moved from being an engine to generate compliance reports to a strategic part of the big security stack. What will you see from these big vendors? Mostly a vision about how buying into their big security stacks you’d be able to enforce a single policy across all of your security domains and gain tremendous operational leverage. I say vision because the reality is these deals have all closed within the last two years and true integration remains way down the line. So make sure to poke hard on the plans for true integration, as opposed to what the booth graphics say. And then add a year or two to their estimates. But there is one area of integration where you can get immediate value which is integration on the purchase order, which we don’t want to minimize. Being able to dramatically expand a security management implementation with money already committed to a 7 or 8-figure enterprise purchase agreement is a good thing. What about the Independents? You know, the handful that remain. These folks have no choice but to focus on the fact they aren’t a big company, but as we mentioned in the IBM/Q1 and MFE/Nitro deal analysis post, security management is a big company game now. But do check out these vendors to see them thinking somewhat out of the box relative to what’s next. Clearly you aren’t going to see a lot of forward thinking innovation out of the big vendors, as they need to focus more in integration. But the smaller vendors should be able to push the ball forward, and then see their innovations co-opted by the big guys. Yup, it’s a brutal world out there, but that’s how things work. Don’t forget about those pesky logs. As mentioned, a lot of focus will be on how SIEM becomes the centerpiece of the big IT companies security stacks. But let’s make the point that Log Management isn’t dead. You’ll see some companies looking to replicate the success of Splunk in focusing on not only security-oriented use cases for log data. That means things like the use cases discussed in our Monitoring Up the Stack research, and things like click stream analysis, transaction fraud detection, and pinpointing IT operations issues. Also expect to hear a bunch about log management in the cloud. For those smaller organizations, this kind of deployment model can make a lot of sense. But there are some multi-tenancy complications to storing your logs in someone else’s cloud. So be sure to ask very detailed and granular questions about how they segment and protect the log data you send to them. Platform hyperbole Finally let’s point out the place where you’ll need to cut through the vendor boasts and hyperbole with a machete. That’s these so-called platforms, described above. We’ve been talking for a long time about the need to go beyond logs for a more functional security management capability, and you’ll hear that at the show as well. But the question will remain, where does the platform begin? And where does it end? There is no clear answer. But let’s be very clear, we believe the security management platform of the future will be able to digest and analyze network full packet capture traffic. As we discussed in our Advanced Network Security Analysis research, to truly confirm a breach and understand the attacks used against you, it requires more granular information that exists in the logs. The question is to what degree the security management vendors acknowledge that. The vendors that have it either via acquisition (RSA) or partnership (everyone else), won’t shy away from this realization. The real question gets back to you. To what degree can your existing personnel and processes make effective use of packet capture data? if you don’t have the sophistication to do malware analysis or do a detailed forensic investigation in house, then logs are good for the time being. But if you are interested in full packet capture, then really hit the vendors on integration with their existing SIEM platform. Firing alerts in two separate consoles doesn’t help you do things faster, nor is clicking on a log record to isolate the packet capture data in another system going to be a long term solution. You’ll also still hear a bit about GRC, but the wind is out of those sails, and justifiably so. Not that IT-GRC platforms can’t add value, but most companies have a hard enough time getting their SIEM to correlate anything, so the idea of a big stack IT-GRC and the associate integration is challenging. Compliance We get the sense that most of the vendors are tired of talking about compliance as they have switched their focus to APT and ‘The Insider Threat’. You know, that sexy security stuff, while compliance continues to be the biggest driver of security spend. Though you know trade shows, the