Tea Risk

At the Tea Risk conference today. Heard a woman keynote all over me, until my brain sploded. Her talk was divided into two part:
1. A retrospective of headlines indicate that there has been no progress in information security in the past twenty years. This trip down corrupted memory lane came with wistful recollections of the punch-card, suspender snapping variety. Vax is what we should nostagicate on now. And despite her involvement in security, and yelling the same thing over and over again, No Progress Has Been Made. I was waiting for her confession that she was part of the problem, doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Didn't come. A slight whiff of the "stoopid luzers" but the topic was dropped without conclusion.
2. A detailed trip through her personal hell of IDENTITY THEFT! Here's what happens: on some records somewhere, her Social Security number is associated with SOMEONE ELSE! Of course, no fraudulent loans were made, no bogus entries on her credit bureaus reports, and the person used a different name, different gender, different address, different date of birth, etc. And yet, she was upset that the police were somewhat reluctant to send out an APD and marshal all available resources to investigate her claim. She hinted that she used less than legal means to get the other individual's address and driver's license, and carried around a stack of papers with all her info into a Kafkaesque morass of bureaucracy. I've seen this sort of thing before in my previous life as an investigator. It's not IDENTITY THEFT, it's a typo. I've been brewing a rant in my head about the words "identity theft," but it probably needs a while longer to attain the desired proof.
This woman's bio lists her as a "risk consultant." Maybe that's why security sux.


Morning at Tea Plantation, by Docbudie via Flickr.

Non Fiction: Risk

From Alex Roy's The Driver:

"Our second hour of 150 mph or more inspired a highly unscientific analysis of the actual danger we faced. I concocted what I called The Danger Coefficient (DC). I guessed the average NASCAR driver, in a thirty-six race season including practice, probably drove 15,000 miles -- with a safety cage and onboard active fire suppression -- on highly prepared tracks, with hospitals less than 14 minutes away by choppers on standby. Assuming this represented a DC of ten, Gumball's 3,000 miles meant our DC was two.... until factoring our relative safety deficiencies. High speeds over potholes had to triple our DC to six. Civilian traffic doubled it again, to twelve. Time and distance to medical help? Double again, to twenty-four. Lack of roll cages, harnesses and HANS devices? My guesses ended when I realized Gumball -- at least the way I did it -- was at least five times more dangerous than NASCAR."

From Wright and Decker's Burglars on the Job:

They referred to this process as "burning bread on yourself."

"Thieves got a thang they say [about getting caught,] "If you think about thangs like that, you burnin' bread on yourself" So you don't think about it... Just go for it. [No. 011]

Several of the subjects found it difficult to speak about the risk of apprehension, fearing that such talk would jinx their future illegal activities.
...
Some of the offenders also tried not to think about getting caught because such thought generated an uncomfortably high level of mental anguish. They believed that the best way to prevent this from happening was to forget about the risk and leave matters to fate.

Fiction

From Ed Park's Personal Days:

"Every employee would soon be required to create a new log-on password consisting of a mix of nonsequential capital letters and a three-digit prime number and a punctuation mark, and then change it once a month by sending an Excel form to a secure website in Oakland. This was just standard operating procedure.

Each demand felt like the securing of a strap on a straitjacket."

4th Quadrant

My favorite ex-quant, N. N. Taleb, outlines the 4th Quadrant.
Thoroughly enjoyable, but I'm a fan.

This table made sense to me:

In information risk management, what sort of events are fat tailed with complex payoff? Or which are not?
I've suspected that there is a parallel between software and markets, as both proxy human behavior, yet are percieved as acting autonomously.

The Wisdom of Mobs

Alex mentions stock prices as a potential input into information risk assessment. I'm skeptical of the value of market driven metrics, and the collective wisdom of the market's crowd in assessing value of an asset. The forces driving stock prices in the short term are not afraid to work with rumor, fact, unrelated fact, remotely disjointed misreported fact and insinduendo.* Corporate stock value can be maintained by close Internet monitoring of cowboy executives, especially if you are in the vicinity of 6th and Lamar in Austin, Texas (a couple of e-mail datapoints: GSD&M and Whole Foods ) Must be something in the bottled water. I've said it before (probably), bad stuff will happen long term if you are a third party managing privacy related data, and you blow it. Because your customers will likely have better information, and have the power to put a long term hurt on your bottom line. If you come clean.

And, of course, out asswards talking I am.

And why haven't I written more in the last few months? I'll let my son answer that:

*not a word, but I like it anyway.

Visualize World Data Breach

38.2% of the known universe has blogged about the Verizon data breach report and how it has changed their life, and opened their eyes, busted icons and confirmed suspicions. But I looked right at the facts there, but I might as well have been completely blind.



My thoughts are simply:

• What? No scatterplots? Bar charts and pie charts combined with narrative paragraphs that don't describe either are sort of lame. Give us an idea if there are two or three mammoth breaches that are skewing your stats. A little creativity would have helped. Don't just think the data breach. Be the data breach.
• It would have helped to have "data breach" defined. Sometimes, the stats are describing a leak of GLB-style NPI, other times credit card info, other times website defacements. What do you want to bet that the threats and controls for a theft of trade secrets is different than for a credit card data from a Bennigan's POS terminal? Is it enlightening to lump this data together? I recall reading many years ago an essay in a scholarly computer science jounal on Computer Crime. They including the classic network hacking and phone phreaking in their analysis, as well as people hijacking trucks carrying motherboards. So, if I hit someone over the head with a laptop that stores unencrypted SSNs, is that a data breach?
• I will give the Verizon guys extra bonus points for not using the report as a sales lead generation tool. I'll rant more on that later.

Photo of Gene Clark courtesy of Find-A-Grave. Think Gene Clark, not Eagles.

Cruel But Fair: The IT Auditor's Ball

There is no need to remind me how I dislike Las Vegas. As the woman walking away from the conference this afternoon said, "casinos are full of weird people." And she wasn't talking about her fellow information systems governance professionals.

Well, I'm almost live blogging the event (no wireless connectivity? 20 lbs of printed procedings? CACS is old school, baby!) from the IT Audit bloggers meetup (the attendees so far: me & a bottle of cheap scotch).
So what did I learn on my first day at the North American Computer Audit Control and Security Conference?

1. Dumb user jokes still get a laugh. The dumb user jokes need to end now. Really. It adds nothing, and only confirms everyone's opinion that security and audit people are arrogant and condescending. More on this later.

2. The "I am not a lawyer" defense to compliance. If something is too unpleasant, or unsavory, yet explicitly outlined in law and regulation, there is a tendency to punt the enforcement to legal. Cause, you don't want to practice law without a license. You know, cops aren't lawyers, either. Nonetheless they enforce the laws. This is an issue that can be solved, and likely has been, between auditors, security practitioners and lawyers.

3. The ice machine on the 13th floor of the Rio is broken. This is the thoughest lesson I've learned. But experience is a bitter and effective teacher.

4. Can gaussian distributions be helpful in analysis of breach disclosure? My butt was in the wrong seat to attend this talk, but the slides were curious (mostly because the color-coding in the pie charts didn't work in the B&W procedings). I would have been interested in hearing how that would work. I don't have the depth in stats to have flung anything at the presenter, but I may have had the guts to shout "HERETIC."

Soundtrack for today: "Raving & Drooling"