Ben Rothke is a Principal Security Consultant at the Nettitude Group and is a CISSP, CISM and PCI QSA. He has over 15 years of industry experience in information systems security and privacy. He is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know, and authors The Security Meltdown blog for CSOonline.
I first met him in Israel on a tour of infosec companies and he always has something thoughtful and interesting to say. Given his tenure, it isn’t surprising that his first major security issue that he can recall was a misconfigured firewall that was letting a whole lot of Internet traffic in. It took him a few hours to figure out the correct configuration. As he said, “everything old is new again when it comes to information security!”
Since he does a lot of PCI compliance work, his go-to tool is Ground Labs Card Recon tool for cardholder data discovery. He also uses tools from Skyhigh Networks and the native AWS security services as well. “The native AWS controls do go a long way to help configure and debug security configurations of their cloud services.” Another tool that he personally uses is Norton Mobile Security to protect his mobile devices. He also uses LastPass for managing his password collection. “I was concerned when they had their breach about putting all my eggs into one basket, so yes, you have to be prepared for that.”
“Nowadays you pretty much know when someone is trying to social engineer you,” he says. You can tell when you get an odd Facebook message or some dopey email, such as someone’s wallet has been stolen while on a trip and you haven’t heard from that person in ten years.” But the attackers have the odds in their favor: “All it takes is a couple of folks to click on the bait and they are living the high life.”
Over the last 18 months he has personally seen three different ransomware cases. For two of them, “they had good backups and ignored the ransom demands and were fine,” he said. The clients were able to reimage their machines and went about their business. However, with one client, “they had no leverage and had to pay the $600 ransom and learn from it. But now they have good backups, they took the attack as a wakeup call.” We commiserated on the fact that “you can’t have too many backups. Now that we have the cloud, it is easier, you can have a huge amount of data backed up without any tapes anymore.”
“Sometimes I see clients that have some rivalry between two different IT divisions,” he says. “It is like the competition between the police and fire departments. But they have to work together, and try to avoid finger pointing, and let them work it out and work together and understand each other’s point of view. Some companies are integrated better than others.” He says there isn’t any real magic to this integration. “It is more of a culture issue. If you are part of the same team, and guys are sitting near each other on the same floor, it is easier for one person to hand off to another and interact with them and build mutual trust.”
Part of the challenge is that everyone needs to be operating “from the same playbook, and understand the same collection of systems. After all, they are all supporting the same business goals and understanding the same endgame,” he says. “The challenge is that it takes a good executive at the top, whether that be a CIO, CTO or a CISO, for everyone to work well together and for this harmony to trickle down. Without this leadership, the conflicts trickle down too.”
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