Over 6 years after the introduction of the first data loss prevention products, DLP technology has not mainstreamed into general acceptance like firewalls.
The cultural phenomenon of companies getting hit by data breaches but not adopting technology countermeasures to mitigate the threat requires deeper investigation but today, I’d like to examine the psychology of data security and data loss prevention.
Data loss has a strange nature that stems from unexpected actions by trusted insiders in an environment assumed to be secure.
Many IT managers are not comfortable with deploying DLP, because it requires admitting to an internal weakness and confessing to not doing your job. Many CEO’s are not comfortable with DLP as it implies employee monitoring (not to mention countries like Germany that forbid employee monitoring).
As a result, most companies adopt business controls in lieu of technology controls. This is not necessarily a mistake, but it’s crucial to implement the business controls properly.
This article will review four business control activities: human resources, internal audit, physical security and information security. I will highlight disconnects in each activity and recommend corrective action at the end of the article.
The HR (human resources) department
Ensuring employee loyalty and reliability is a central value for HR, which has responsibility for hiring and guiding the management of employees. High-security organizations, such as defense contractors or securities traders, add additional screening such as polygraphs and security checks to the hiring process.
Over time, organizations may sense personality changes, domestic problems or financial distress that indicate increased extrusion risks for employees in sensitive jobs.
Disconnect No. 1: HR isn’t accountable for the corporate brand and therefore doesn’t pay the price when trusted employees and contractors steal data.
What can you do? Make HR part of an inter-departmental team to deal with emerging threats from social media and smart phones.
Internal audit
Data loss prevention is ostensibly part of an overall internal audit process that helps an organization achieve its objectives in the areas of:
- Operational effectiveness
- Reliability of financial reporting
- Compliance with applicable laws and regulations
Internal auditors in the insurance industry say regulation has been their key driver for risk assessment and implementation of preventive procedures and security tools such as intrusion detection.
Born in the 1960s and living on in today’s Windows and Linux event logs, log analysis is still the mainstay of the IT audit. The IT industry has now evolved to cloud computing, virtualization,Web services and converged IP networks.
Welcome to stateless HTTP transactions, dynamic IP addressing and Microsoft Sharepoint where the marketing group can setup their own site and start sharing data with no controls at all.
Off-line analysis of logs has fallen behind and yields too little, too late for the IT auditor! According to the PCI Data Security council in Europe – over 30% of companies with a credit card breach discovered the breach after 30 days and 40% after more than 60 days.
Disconnect No. 2: IT auditors have the job, but they have outdated tools and are way behind the threat curve. What can you do? Give your internal auditors, real-time network-based data loss monitoring and let them do their job.
Physical security
Physical security starts at the parking lot and continues to the office, with tags and access control. Office buildings can do a simple programming of the gates to ensure that every tag leaving the building also entered the building.
Many companies run employee awareness programs to remind the staff to guard classified information and to look for suspicious behavior.
Disconnect No. 3: Perfect physical security will be broken by an iPhone. What can you do? Not much.
Information security
Information security builds layers of firewalls and content security at the network perimeter, and permissions and identity management that control access by trusted insiders to digital assets, such as business transactions, data warehouse and files.
Consider the psychology behind wall and moat security.
Living inside a walled city lulls the business managers into a false sense of security.
Do not forget that firewalls let traffic in and out, and permissions systems grant access to trusted insiders by definition. For example, an administrator in the billing group will have permission to log on to the accounting database and extract customer records using SQL commands.
He can then zip the data with a password and send the file using a private Web mail or ssh account.
Content-security tools based on HTTP/SMTP proxies are effective against viruses, malware and spam (assuming they’re maintained properly). These tools weren’t designed for data loss prevention.
They don’t inspect internal traffic; they scan only authorized e-mail channels. They rely on file-specific content recognition and have scalability and maintenance issues. When content security tools don’t fit, we’ve seen customers roll out home-brewed solutions with open-source software such as Snort and Ethereal.
A client of ours once used Snort to nail an employee who was extracting billing records with command-line SQL and stealing the results by Web mail. The catch is that they knew someone was stealing data – and deployed Snort as a way of collecting incriminating evidence, not as a proactive real-time network monitoring tool.
Disconnect No. 4: Relying on permissions and identity management is like running a retail store that screens you coming in but doesn’t put magnetic tags on the clothes to prevent you from wearing that expensive hat going out.
What can do you? Implement real-time data loss audit using passive network monitoring at the perimeter. You’ll get an excellent picture of anomalous data flowing out of your network without the cost of installing software agents on desktops and servers.
The trick is catching and then remediating the vulnerability as fast as you can. If it’s an engineer sending out design files or a contractor surfing the net from your firewall – fix it now, not 3 months from now.
Conclusion
To correct the disconnects and make data security part of your business, you need to start with CEO-level commitment to data security. Your company’s management controls should explicitly include data security:
Cross-posted from Israeli Software
- Soft controls: Values and behavior sensing
- Direct controls: Good hiring and physical security
- Indirect controls: Internal audit
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