Myths of DLP

By cliang1 Comment
The cybersecurity industry commonly names DLP as Data Leakage Prevention.  It lacks of qualifier because the technology just tries to detect/prevent human mistake nor broken business process.  In that sense, DLP is likely capable. There are always many means to exfiltrate data as there are many "holes" in the infrastructure.  The fencing is good to block trespasser but not getting materials thru the fence. Use of DLP or other technology just makes data exfiltration harder, or takes longer time to do so.  Imagine, all of us have cell phone that is an effective tool to beat DLP.  How many organizations will demand surrendering cell phone before: Coming to attend confidential discussion (e.g. the movie "Salt") Accessing sensitive information at workplace Disabling remote access The term shall therefore be rephrased as Data Leakage Protection and set the proper expectation what can be done and what are limitations....
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Least Privilege

By cliangNo Comments
Another practice in physical world is adopted in cyber world - least privilge principle. However, we must bear in mind that privileges could be elevated or circumvented due to system weakness or unmanaged vulnerabilities. Therefore, regular assessment for assurance is required to validate if controls are still effective....
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Zoning

By cliangNo Comments
Many cyber practices are actually adopted from physical world. Zoning is an example. Main purpose is to isolate object path (incoming / outgoing) to secure the port control. Authentication (immigration) and inspection (security screening) are added measures....
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The 4C of cybersecurity

By cliangNo Comments
Cautious - understand cybersecurity is important but need to explore how to execute or manage Conformance - doing things adhere to the cybersecurity requirements Compliance - having 3rd party review and certified for cybersecurity assurance of a selected scope Committment - every aspect takes care of cybersecurity For the illustration, it is solely BS1363 compliance for the scope of the AC plug itself.  Though there is metal earth pin, it is just dummy and cannot achieve the intended protection (end-to-end security)...
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Give and Take

By cliangNo Comments
Cybersecurity and convenience are always contradictory.  The Touch ID is a convenient means to unlock the device and deemed secure because fingerprints are supposed unique. But if we give further thoughts, there are several pitfalls. The Touch ID only protects the data-at-rest scenario. It can't secure your data if your phone is unlocked (data-in-use) nor you submitting sensitive data across the network (data-in-motion). Frequent use of Touch ID will make you tend to forget the text base password, affecting availability in situation you need to provide password Text base password is secure over biometric in a special case: if you are under duress, attacker can force you to unlock your device from your biometric attributes ... even if you are dead; but text base password cannot be extracted from a dead person's mental memory. An example is the locked iPhone from the Boston bomber that evolved into court case to debate national security vs data privacy. This is a matter of expectation...
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Expect the Unexpected

By cliang1 Comment
The network anomalies detection suddenly becomes a popular topic in cyber protection market.  This is to expect something unexpected then manage it, i.e. deviation from normal. At a glance it appears as an amazing technology: no more signature based detection, no need to update detection definition, deploy and forget solution. But if you think deeper, the technology needs a time period to learn your environment as baseline.  Any deviations from this baseline will be treated as the "unexpected". The challenges are: How do you know if current network traffic is normal but not already compromised How much time is sufficient to establish the baseline in order to reduce false negatives or false positives to acceptable trusted level? How about traffic that disappears from baseline, is the technology able to report? Seasonal network traffic will further add complication Is the technology that vendor claims only able to handle specific scenarios? Does the vendor need extensive time to learn your environment? Last but not least,...
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