Tag Archives: risk assessment

Three Danger Signs I Look for when Scoping Risk Assessments

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Scoping an enterprise-level risk assessment can be a real guessing game. One of the main problems is that it’s much more difficult and time consuming to do competent risk assessments of organizations with shoddy, disorganized information security programs than it is organizations with complete, well organized information security programs. There are many reasons why this is true, but generally it is because attaining accurate information is more difficult and because one must dig more deeply to ascertain the truth. So when I want to quickly judge the state of an organization’s information security program, I look for “danger” signs in three areas.

First, I’ll find out what kinds of network security assessments the organization undertakes. Is external network security assessment limited to vulnerability studies, or are penetration testing and social engineering exercises also performed on occasion? Does the organization also perform regular vulnerability assessments of the internal network? Is internal penetration testing also done? How about software application security testing? Are configuration and network architecture security reviews ever done?

Second, I look to see how complete and well maintained their written information security program is. Does the organization have a complete set of written information security policies that cover all of the business processes, IT processes and equipment used by the organization? Are there detailed network diagrams, inventories and data flow maps in place? Does the organization have written vendor management, incident response and business continuity plans? Are there written procedures in place for all of the above? Are all of these documents updated and refined on a regular basis? 

Third, I’ll look at the organization’s security awareness and training program. Does the organization provide security training to all personnel on a recurring basis? Is this training “real world”? Are security awareness reminders generously provided throughout the year? If asked, will general employees be able to tell you what their information security responsibilities are? Do they know how to keep their work areas, laptops and passwords safe? Do they know how to recognize and resist social engineering tricks like phishing emails? Do they know how to recognize and report a security incident, and do they know their responsibilities in case a disaster of some kind occurs?

I’ve found that if the answer to all of these questions is “yes”, you will have a pretty easy time conducting a thorough risk assessment of the organization in question. All of the information you need will be readily available and employees will be knowledgeable and cooperative. Conversely I’ve found that if the answer to most (or even some) of these questions is “no” you are going to have more problems and delays to deal with. And if the answers to all of these questions is “no”, you should really build in plenty of extra time for the assessment. You will need it!

Thanks to John Davis for this post.

MSI Launches New Threat Modeling Offering & Process

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Yesterday, we were proud to announce a new service offering and process from MSI. This is a new approach to threat modeling that allows organizations to proactively model their threat exposures and the changes in their risk posture, before an infrastructure change is made, a new business operation is launched, a new application is deployed or other IT risk impacts occur.

Using our HoneyPoint technology, organizations can effectively model new business processes, applications or infrastructure changes and then deploy the emulated services in their real world risk environments. Now, for the first time ever, organizations can establish real-world threat models and risk conditions BEFORE they invest in application development, new products or make changes to their firewalls and other security tools.

Even more impressive is that the process generates real-world risk metrics that include frequency of interaction with services, frequency of interaction with various controls, frequency of interaction with emulated vulnerabilities, human attackers versus automated tools, insight into attacker capabilities, focus and intent! No longer will organizations be forced to guess at their threat models, now they can establish them with defendable, real world values!

Much of the data created by this process can be plugged directly into existing risk management systems, risk assessment tools and methodologies. Real-world values can be established for many of the variables and other metrics, that in the past have been decided by “estimation”.

Truly, if RISK = THREAT X VULNERABILITY, then this new process can establish that THREAT variable for you, even before typical security tools like scanners, code reviews and penetration testing have a rough implementation to work against to measure VULNERABILITY. Our new process can be used to model threats, even before a single line of real code has been written – while the project is still in the decision or concept phases!

We presented this material at the local ISSA chapter meeting yesterday. The slides are available here:

Threat Modeling Slides

Give us a call and schedule a time to discuss this new capability with an engineer. If your organization is ready to add some maturity and true insight into its risk management and risk assessment processes, then this just might be what you have been waiting for.