Category: Policies

A machine in the corner of the mall for digital currency exchange. Whether you use it or not is a kind of risk taking because you don't know what is behind the machine, who operates it, any proper business license to protect your money if things go wrong. In digital world, we must not solely put focus just on cyber protection. Every aspect counts towards a secure business model. From the digital currency operator's perspective, secure cyber protection is not enough. Physical security, anti-tampering to manipulate network connection, I/O port interfaces and so on are all attack vectors. From he customer perspective, trustworthy of the machine is the prime concern. ...

A trivial observation will reveal a lot of issues about the security culture of an organization. 1. Does the organization: Have information security policies in place Define the differennt information classes Provide examples of each information class Establish approval process with appropriate authoritive level to declassify information for sharing Deploy viable means to share confidential materials Communicate properly all staff with mandatory regular refresher programme Integrate information security undertaking in the employment term Impose discrepancy process for policy violation Enforce role based access profile per job function Review periodically for appropriate access rights 2. Do the staff: Have minimal access to information just per the job roles Forget to reclassify the information after approval has been granted Understand what has gone wrong It seems so many issues have been surfaced but this is the challenge and a matter of fact when all of us living in the digital world, not-to-mention unstructured information is everywhere beyond the organization cyber landscape. The bottom line relies on human rather than technologies to secure information mandated by policies (written directives). ...

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is suddenly becoming eye-catching in ICT. No doubt, this will enhance cybersecurity as untrusted by default. The theory is simple: going thru multiple policies (technical configuration settings) and authentication before gaining access to the designated network resources. The controls are applied on who (access roles), when (time of day), what (network resources), where (network location) & why (what type of transaction or business reason). In a nutshell, who to access what resources from where and when with legitimate reason (why). The pitfall is the "how" … how does the existing environment fit with this access model and not-to-mention the changes in user experience. A M2M (Machine to Machine) ZTNA might be applicable use case but this will definitely take a while to transform for access involving human. Even worst, some cybersecurity practitioners introduce this ZTNA model in the ICS environment to combat against cyber threats which are even just conceptual because the ICS environment has...

I came across certain cybersecurity practitioners who are obsessive with technical controls and insist a strict binary decision in determining policy compliance. Otherwise, so-called non-compliance process needs to be initiated with necessary executive signature as acceptance. Even worst, the policy is badly written and lack of precise generic as well as precise specific at the appropriate scenarios. Such mentality is not securing the business but an major obstacle in digital transformation and competitiveness with peers. As competent cybersecurity practitioners, our roles is to explain what are protection in place to neutralize the published cyber threats rather than creating FUD to management. Sometimes, a management directive with disciplinary action for non-compliance is far much cost-effective than technical controls. Example is password complexity and MFA, this only make password sharing harden but not impossible. Education is another domain why we should not doing so. More technical controls means complexity. Complexity doesn't make it more secure but user will try to evade or circumvent the...