There has been a lot of talk in the news lately about election hacking, especially about the Russia government possibly attempting to subvert the upcoming presidential election. And I think that in a lot of ways it is good that this has come up. After all, voting systems are based on networked computer systems. Private election and campaign information is stored and transmitted on networked computer systems. That means that hacking can indeed be a factor in elections, and the public should be made well aware of it. We are always being told by ‘authorities’ and ‘pundits’ what is and is not possible. And generally we are gullible enough to swallow it. But history has a lot of lessons to teach us, and one of the most important is that the ‘impossible’ has a nasty way of just happening.

Authorities are saying now that because of the distributed nature of voting systems and redundancies in voting record-keeping that it would be virtually impossible for an outside party to rig the numbers in the election. But that is just a direct method of affecting an election. What about the indirect methods? What would happen, for instance, if hackers could just cause delays and confusion on Election Day? If they could cause long lines in certain voting districts and smooth sailing in other voting districts, couldn’t they affect the number of Democratic Votes versus Republican votes? We all know that if there is a hassle at the polls that a lot of people will just give up and go back home again. And this is just one way that elections could be affected by hacking. There are bound to be plenty of others.

With this in mind, isn’t it wise to err on the side of caution? Shouldn’t we as a people insist that our voting systems are secured as well as is possible? Don’t we want to consider these systems to be ‘vital infrastructure’? These are the reasons I advocate instituting best practices as the guidance to be used when securing electronic voting systems. Systems should be configured as securely as possible, associated communications systems should be robust and highly encrypted, risk should be assessed and addressed before the election, monitoring efforts should be strictly followed and incident response plans should be practiced and ready to go. These efforts would be one good way to help ensure a fair and ‘hacker free’ election.

Organizations have a lot of trouble with information security programs:

• They don’t really understand the reasons why modern concerns must have effective information security programs or how to properly integrate them into their present business models.
• They don’t truly understand the complexities of modern computer and communications systems and so have no gut instinct how to properly secure them. They therefore must trust information security pundits and service providers even though they get lots of contradictory and confusing advice.
• They spend a lot of money buying all kinds of security devices and services and they find that their information security program is still full of holes and problems.
• And after all of this, they find that they are constantly being asked for even more money to buy even more devices and services.

Sound familiar? Who wouldn’t become frustrated and cynical?! So my advice is: whenever a problem becomes seemingly too complex to tackle, go back to the beginning and start from first principles.

What exactly are you trying to protect? Have you identified and prioritized the business functions, information, devices and infrastructure that you need in order to run smoothly as an organization? If not, that should be your first priority. You should record and prioritize every business function needed to run your organization. You should also ensure that you keep accurate inventories of critical software applications and hardware devices. In addition, you should know exactly how information flows into, out of and around your network and what trusts what. If you don’t know exactly what you have, how can you protect it effectively, and what is more, economically?

Do you have effective mechanisms in place to limit access to your systems and information? You need to limit access to only those individuals who have a real need for that access (something you have just quantified by taking care of the first step outlined above). That means that you must configure your systems correctly to require user authentication, you must properly enroll and disenroll users correctly, you must properly identify those seeking access and you must have access management plans in place to oversee the whole process.

Have you leveraged your most valuable information security asset: your employees? Machines can only aid people in information security matters, they can never replace them. If you properly train, and what is even more important, enfranchise your employee personnel in the information security program, the return will astound you. Make them understand how valuable they are to the organization and ask for their help in security matters. Make information security training a fun thing and pass out kudos and small rewards to those who help the program. This can save you big money on automated security systems that just don’t perform as advertised.

Are you storing and transmitting information securely? For most organizations, information is their most valuable asset. If this is true of your organization, you should ensure that you properly protect it when it is moving or just sitting in storage. You should classify information for type and sensitivity and protect it accordingly. Spare no expense in protecting the really important info, but why waste time and money encrypting or otherwise protecting minor information that is of little consequence if revealed?

Do you know what is happening on your systems? Computer networks and the processes and people controlling them must be effectively monitored. Organizations should employ effective tools to monitor, parse and consolidate events and log data on their networks. But these should only be tools to aid humans in making this task manageable; they can never actually replace the human element. In addition, management personnel at all levels of the organization should have processes in place to ensure that security policies and procedures are current, effective and enforced. If you perform these tasks correctly, the most difficult part of incident response – incident identification – is also taken care of.

Do you test your security measures? You can never really tell how effective an information security program is without testing it. There are many tools available that test your network for security vulnerabilities such as configuration errors, access holes and out of date systems. You should employ these mechanisms regularly and patch the holes they uncover in a logical and hierarchical manner. You should also consider other kinds of security tests such as penetration testing, application testing and social engineering exercises. These will help you understand not only where the holes are, but how well your systems and personnel are coping with them.

These processes are the foundation of an effective information security program. If you build these strongly, other information security processes such as incident response, business continuity and vendor management will be well supported. If you skimp on these most basic steps, then your information security program will likely collapse of its own weight.

Computer systems and networks are irrevocably woven into the fabric of business practices around the world; we quite literally cannot do without them. What’s more, our lives and our business practices become more dependent on these devices every day. Unfortunately, this makes computer networks the number one criminal playground in the modern world.

Although computer security technology and processes are becoming increasingly effective, cyber-criminals have more than kept pace. Every year the number of computer security compromises is increasing. Cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated and can originate from anywhere that has Internet connectivity. It should also be remembered that cyber-criminals only have to be successful in one of their attacks to win, while businesses must successfully defend against every attack, every time to win the game. The upshot of all this is that every business is increasingly liable to experience some kind of cyber-attack. That is the reason why regulators and security professionals have been pushing businesses to increase the scope and effectiveness of their incident response capabilities in recent years.

To help counter modern cyber-incidents effectively, organizations must respond to them quickly and in an accurate, pre-determined manner. IR teams must determine and document specific actions to be taken in the event common information security events occur. Responsibilities for performing these incident response “procedures” should be assigned to specific team members. Once detailed procedures for addressing common security incidents have been completed, the IR team should review them and role play response scenarios on a recurring basis (at least twice annually is recommended). It is an unfortunate truth that incident response is a perishable skill and must be regularly practiced to be effective.

This same advice also applies to business continuity/disaster recovery plans – functionally, they are really the same thing as incident response. Whether your business is facing a flood, a tornado, a cyber-attack or even an employee error, they all have negative effects that can be lessened if you have effective, pre-planned responses in place that everyone involved is familiar with and has practiced regularly. So why not practice IR and BC/DR together? It can minimize the time personnel are away from their regular business duties and maximize the effectiveness of their training.