[Dataloss] rant: Abandon Ship! Data Loss Ahoy!

[Adam Shostack]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 04:44:15PM -0400, James Ritchie, CISA, QSA wrote:
| Being compliant does not mean being secure and being secure does not 
| mean being compliant.  What most people forget with all the compliance 
| is that constant vigilance must be maintained.  Does that mean daily, 
| weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually that you have to verify that the 
| controls are working appropriately? What I think will be the outcome is 
| if appropriate due diligence and due care can be shown as fact, the 
| liability will be reduced or eliminated.  They will compare the actions 
| taken and of similar size companies to see if what they had done was 
| appropriate. To make any company 100% secure, the cost of security would 
| be so prohibited, the company would be bankrupt.  There has to be a 
| balance and reasonable effort shown.

How do you "compare the actions of similar size companies?"  That's a
secret.  What's a reasonable effort?  That's a secret too.  What
happens?  That's no longer a secret, thanks to mandatory breach
disclosure.

ADam

| Adam Shostack wrote:
| > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:13:08AM -0500, Allan Friedman wrote:
| > | >  On the public policy issue, I agree. If you want companies to disclose
| > | >  the exact circumstances around a breach (exact technical details), there
| > | >  will have to be a shield that prevents plaintiffs attorney's from using
| > | >  the information in lawsuits.
| > | 
| > | You highlight an interesting trade-off. It may be the case that more
| > | disclosure would reduce incentives to prevent future breaches,
| > | depending on how we understand the problem.
| > | 
| > | A standard policy tool for enforcing maximum diligence is the threat
| > | of lawsuits, massive ones that can wreck a corporation. If we follow
| > | this liability argument (as advanced by Schneier and other scholars of
| > | the economics of information security) then making concessions to
| > | corporate defendants can impede the end goal of less data retention
| > | and greater data protection.
| > | 
| > | If we don't think we're ever going to get there, then more data about
| > | breaches for the purposes of research is clearly the greater good.
| > | This is a very interesting dynamic. I'll have to think about how to
| > | model it...
| >
| > For this policy to be effective, costs must be aligned with a failure
| > to take effective measures.  Today, we lack the data to asses how
| > effective various 'best practices' or standards are.  Gene Kim and
| > company have done work showing that a few part of COBIT are key, and
| > others are not correlated with they outcomes they studied.  (There's a
| > CERIAS talk video you can find.)  There's claims that Hannaford was
| > PCI complaint. Shouldn't that have made them secure?
| >
| > So lawsuits today are random.  With better data, we may be able to
| > better attribute blame.  Perhaps this shapes a temporary liability
| > shield, with a goal of revisiting it later, or allowing case law to
| > shape it for a while?
| >
| > Adam
| >
| > _______________________________________________
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| > http://attrition.org/dataloss
| >
| > Tenable Network Security offers data leakage and compliance monitoring
| > solutions for large and small networks. Scan your network and monitor your
| > traffic to find the data needing protection before it leaks out!
| > http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/compliance.shtml
| >
| >   
| 
| -- 
| James Ritchie
| CISA, PCI-QSA, ASV, MCSE, MCP+I, M-CIW-D, CIW-CI, Inet+, Network+, A+
| 
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| traffic to find the data needing protection before it leaks out!
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