[BreachExchange] The five most common IT security missteps

[Inga Goddijn]

https://www.itworldcanada.com/sponsored/the-five-most-common-it-security-missteps

All too often, enterprises get caught in the familiar cycle of deploying an
endless stream of the latest and greatest security products and assuming
this will successfully mitigate risk. More often than not, though, this
creates a complex and wasteful technology sprawl and an incomplete view of
the full cyber security portfolio. So, it’s not surprising that when a data
breach occurs, companies again must revert to reactive mode and spend time
and resources searching for the root cause – whether it’s a misconfigured
device, an unpatched application, an employee falling for a phishing attack
or some other reason. But this approach often “misses the forest for the
trees” since most breaches are not the result of these moment-in-time
errors. Instead, they are almost always caused by decisions made well
before the breach ever occurs.

By taking more time to build a risk-centric foundation that includes making
better decisions relating to security funding and operations, enterprises
in Canada and beyond can dramatically reduce the likelihood of a breach
months or even years down the road. Here’s my list of the top five areas
where IT security typically breaks down and can cause enterprises to
increase the risk of a breach.

*Misstep 1: Underestimating the need for professional services to optimize
technology investments *
Most of us who wish to stay healthy understand the value of visiting the
doctor at regular intervals for checkups. If we were all experts on
physical fitness and diet, we wouldn’t need doctors. Unfortunately, many
enterprises do not adapt this recipe for personal health to their security
environments. This manifests itself in their budgets – they budget for
product/maintenance renewals, but not for professional services to
determine if their products are performing the way they should.

This “set it and forget it” mentality has led to an epidemic of
sub-optimally configured and deployed security tools that create
significant gaps in defenses. This is why so many enterprises today find
themselves with massively complex, disparate and expensive-to-manage
security infrastructures that, when all is said and done, are largely
ineffective against modern adversaries.

One other thing to consider: Many organizations assume that security OEMs
are the best resource for deploying and optimizing their security
environments. The reality is, OEMs are manufacturers, not security services
integrators (SSIs), and their expertise is often limited to their own
technology suite. To truly understand one’s infrastructure, it’s critical
to have assessments conducted by technology-neutral professional services
organizations that can provide strategic guidance on infrastructure
rationalization and optimization.

*Misstep 2: Relying on a DIY approach to technology implementation*
Many organizations take a “do it yourself” (DIY) approach to security
technology implementation. Security skillsets are more readily available
today on the employee market than ever before, and it is easy to fall into
the trap of trying to save money by using internal staff to deploy new
technologies. Not surprisingly, this can lead to problems ranging from
configuration issues to suboptimal use of product features. In fact, DIY
deployments are one of the most common sources of vulnerability causing
data breaches. Recent statistics confirm that a majority of breaches have
occurred within companies that only use DIY resources.

While it’s understandable that many IT and security personnel want to take
on product deployment in-house – largely due to budget constraints – it
often results in one of two undesirable scenarios:

   - The person responsible for implementation is not an expert on the
   product or service, so the technology is incorrectly configured.
   - The department in charge is resource-constrained, so they rush to
   deploy the product or service without understanding its capabilities and
   enabling its advanced features. Replacing a simple port-based firewall with
   a next-generation firewall and migrating legacy rule sets simply ensures
   the same problems as before – with more expense.

The first problem opens organizations up to security and compliance risks,
while the latter prevents them from optimizing their technology investments.

*Misstep 3: Over-complicating technology deployments at the expense of
effectiveness*
When you buy a new car, it’s all too easy to get caught up in fancy bells
and whistles, rather than focusing on what really matters – like driver
position and the comfort of using gas and brake pedals. Similarly, some IT
and security teams have a tendency to over-configure new technology with
endless custom rules designed to send alerts on every possible scenario –
largely because they think this strategy will help them justify their
investment to c-suite and board members.

However, configuring too many rules can prevent the security operations
team from seeing the forest through the trees. Rather than alerting you to
real anomalous events, suspicious activity and potential threats, it can
bombard you with an oppressive number of security alerts that turn out to
be redundant or false-positives. Devoting so much time to benign alerts
causes organizations to waste enormous resources and severely compromises
security effectiveness.

*Misstep 4: Failure to gain visibility into the complete technology
environment*
Most security organizations don’t have a complete understanding of the
products and services in their IT environments. Rogue IT business units pop
up everywhere, introducing complexity and risk for security operations
teams. This is dangerous, because you can’t protect systems, services and
other assets if you don’t even know you have them. On top of this, many
security organizations don’t fully understand how the technologies in their
security environments can potentially integrate together to make life
easier on their security operations teams. Once the inventory is done, then
security teams can capitalize on the myriad of orchestration and automation
options on the market to make them more efficient. Additionally, there is a
burgeoning shelfware problem in security, where organizations purchase the
latest “check list” of security tools but then never get around to
deploying them.

It is critical for security organizations to take a step back and
understand their complete inventory of security tools and services, as well
as the IT assets they are supposed to protect. If nothing else, get help
discovering and learning what is in the environment before adding more
complexity. Once this is done, it becomes possible to rationalize the
security infrastructure into a more manageable and cohesive framework that
maps to the organization’s IT infrastructure and business objectives.

*Misstep 5: Setting unrealistic expectations for security projects *
Many security practitioners view their jobs in a vacuum, and fail to
realize that their company is unable to move as quickly as they would like.
Security projects often affect business users, requiring them to dedicate
time in requirements gathering or to test applications following a cutover.
Fairly frequently, we see clients building project timelines for security
projects that are simply unreasonable given the size and complexity of the
business.

When planning out any security project, it is vital to understand the
capabilities of the internal staff to get high-quality work done in a
reasonable time frame. It isn’t realistic to assign overly demanding
timelines to overworked or under-skilled staff, because they will make
mistakes and, ultimately, miss their deadlines (and miss them badly). It is
far better to assign achievable timelines that account for individual
workloads and skill sets – this will result in fewer errors and delays.

*Overcoming the five missteps: Putting your security program on sure
footing*
Companies impacted by any one of these missteps face increased security and
compliance risks. In addition, they likely aren’t getting the full value
out of their technology investments, which can be a major problem when it
is time to explain to executives how budget dollars are translating into
improved security posture.

When it comes to avoiding these potential pitfalls, awareness is half the
battle. The other half is translating this knowledge into sound
decision-making on security investments, operations and strategies. The
only way to truly reduce the risk of data breaches, compliance violations
and wasted resources is to abandon the age-old, reactive “outside in”
approach to security (where decisions are based on the latest threats,
regulations and other external forces). Instead, security professionals
should take the opposite approach to security: inside-out, where security
strategy starts with a core understanding of enterprise needs, strategy and
risk profile. This enables organizations to rationalize their
infrastructure and optimize operations so everything maps to the enterprise
risk model, rather than the latest headline-grabbing threat. As the saying
goes, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.” Get
professional help. Security systems integrators have the advantage of
working with many clients and pattern-matching what works and what doesn’t.
This knowledge dramatically increases the likelihood that companies will
achieve enterprise security that is radically stronger, simpler, less
costly and more accountable…with far fewer missteps!
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