Author: cliang

As a security practitioner, providing advice in securing the organization cyber assets is the expected responsibilities and everyone in the organization has such expectation. In commercial world, resources are limited and there are always risks in business operations. Therefore, risk management is needed in an organization to prioritize resources in consistently dealing with the risks. A risk-based approach to deploy appropriate controls must be in place, i.e. objectively per organization risk matrix rather than subjectively per individual perception. After all, there won't be zero-risk business in this world. I come across a situation that a security practitioner demands uplifting the criticality of a target system just by personal feeling while the consequence does not exceed the threshold guideline per the official organization risk matrix. The escalated criticality of consequence could be legitimate because business environment or threat landscape have changed. Then the correct attitude is to revise the organization risk matrix which serves the foundation for consistent assessment. We must...

At certain situations, enforcement of policy relies on administrative control when technical controls are not feasible. But how do we ensure no offender? No, we can't. The only thing we can do is to establish consequence-based deterrent enforced by laws & regulations. The most severe deterrent is death sentence. A traffic sign prohibits vehicle longer than 10m or over 10 tones on left turn as illustrated. There is no stopping you to do so but if your truck exceeds this limit and still turning left, your truck might be trapped in the road curve blocking other road users, crashing vehicle in the opposite lane, or damaging any other third party properties. Then you are fully accountable for civil offence if negligence or criminal offence if deliberately doing so. Similarly, management always talks about how to stop insider threats in dealing with cybersecurity. The same philosophy applies - discrepancy action for employees or contractual obligation for business partners with...