ISSA Security Awareness Column October 2012 – Learning From Safety Risk Communications

Any endeavour is made doubly difficult when pursued with a lack of metrics and without a clear understanding of cause and effect. When stumbling in the dark, facts are the flashlight of comprehension, illuminating the way forward when the path is unclear. Information security is often required to function in the dark with little in the way of facts to guide us. We hear noises and bump into things but can never be certain if we’re going in the right direction.

When security fails, how do we know? While failures of integrity and availability are obvious, failures of confidentiality can be silent and insidious. Some actors such as LulzSec boast about their exploits and derive their benefits from the resulting publicity. Other actors quietly go about their ‘business’ and organisations may not realise they’ve been breached. Often, even when we do discover failures of confidentiality the organisational interest is to bury it. As a result, our profession is rich in rumours but poor in facts which make it difficult when trying to understand the effectiveness of security controls.