CEIC 2015 Highlights: Thwarting Malware, FRCP Rules Changes, Corporate Cyberbullying, Collaborating for the Win

CEIC® 2015 began with a one-day CISO/CLO Summit that gathered security and legal chiefs to collaborate on emerging best practices in defending the enterprise, as well as an energetic CEIC welcome keynote from our president and CEO Patrick Dennis and Roger Angarita, our head of product development. Patrick talked about how the legal, security, and forensic investigation communities are blending together, both to collaborate and even to expand their own professional areas of responsibility. Our data is converging—and so are our professions—which is good news, since as we collaborate, we are turning the tide in the defense of our organizations, our citizens, and our economies.

The State of the Union Address and the Call for Corporate and Armed Forces Evolution

Mark Harrington

This week’s State of the Union Address was the fourth in a row in which President Obama highlighted the critical nature of cybersecurity. Until the most recent onslaught of headlines painted a painful picture of the consequences of a data breach, all too many of our organizations have been focused on passing compliance audits and dealing with a broad variety of threats to long-term business viability. Times have changed, and the headlines and the tough reality are all crystal clear: the bad guys are strong, dedicated, and working productively together, and they are in our networks today.

As President Obama said, lawmakers must “finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks,” and, “If we don’t act, we’ll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable.” Recently proposed legislation would relieve some of the risk of participating in the information-sharing for which the federal government is asking. Defending our organizations is becoming increasingly complicated for legal and security teams, so it’s crucial for such legislation to increase the incentives or decrease the exposure that companies would experience in being more transparent and collaborative with government when data breaches occur. 

How Legal Can Leverage the Latest Version of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework

Mark Harrington

Last week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released an update to its Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, incorporating feedback from its October workshop as well as responses to an August Request for Information. While adoption of the Framework remains voluntary and not a regulatory requirement, many large organizations in a variety of industries consider it to be an effective benchmark for security operations. We at Guidance Software believe it will soon be considered a “commercially reasonable” standard, but we also recommend incorporating additional, proactive security practices for a more complete security posture.

This most recent update to the Framework reports on certain implementation issues, including the need to expand awareness among smaller and medium-sized businesses in the critical infrastructure sector. Some concern exists that the Implementation tier of the Framework’s three main components—Core, Profile, and Implementation Tiers—is being used the least frequently. Instead, the Framework is being most commonly used simply as a basis for evaluating security—as a yardstick, if you will.

Information-Sharing Holds Real Promise for More Effective Organizational Defense

Among the aspects of the NIST Framework that I believe holds the most promise in defending our organizations is that of information-sharing. Many who have responded to NIST’s calls for feedback have expressed interest in expanding this type of collaboration in order to build more powerful threat intelligence feeds across American industries. While interest in participation is high, so are the levels of concern about potential impact on corporate reputation if data breaches were made public. Since the original Framework was published, there has been a clear call for a means of reporting a breach and related information anonymously.

Congress has just passed the National Cybersecurity Protection Act in order to better support cyber-threat information exchange between the public and private sector via the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. However, a bill that incorporates liability protections for those reporting on breaches will have to wait until early next year.