Over in the US, Senator Obama has recently been talking about his stance on Cyber terrorism. While there were many interesting points in his proposals, I wanted to home in on his comments regarding the protection of national infrastructure. You don't need to be a technological genius to have figured out that computers pretty much run every aspect of our daily lives these days -- transportation networks, utilities, broadcast information... you name it. It's fair to say, then, that if you could find a way of compromising those computers you could really mess up everyone's day....

So, in conversations with customers of late, I've observed a steady increase in talk of plans to soon adopt ISO 27002, or active work to get the standard implemented in some fashion. This isn't necessarily surprising, particularly when you're talking with highly regulated companies or those more apt to understand information risk management, overall (e.g., those in banking, insurance and utilities, or more recently, thanks to PCI DSS, retail). Because, as I suspect most would agree (and speak up if you don't!), 27002 provides an incredibly broad and deep view into the types of security controls an organization should at least consider when building a security and information risk management program.

What has certainly come as more of a surprise, though, is...

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New co-host Amanda Van Veen interviews Linda Lynch, RSA® Conference Europe Manager, about this year's Conference in October. Learn about the early bird registration special as well as other helpful travel hints and session highlights. Register today: www.rsaconference.com/2008/europe.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the topic of "defining compliance." One of the suggestions raised was that businesses that identify a common control framework, or combination of frameworks, may have an opportunity to significantly reduce costs and redundancies associated with their compliance program. The idea is that rather than approaching each requirement in a silo, and therefore attacking each related security requirement in isolation, it would be better to ensure that the organization is looking more horizontally at the types of security controls that must be enacted in the context of all the requirements that must be met...

Yes folks, the PCI DSS's first major update since version 1.1 was announced in September 2006 is on the horizon. Unveiled in May by the PCI Security Standards Council, the new version, called 1.2, is due out in October. Over the past few weeks, I've received a myriad of inquiries from merchants and figured this would be a good forum to share some of them...

So this one's been digging away at me for a while. I just think that the term "Security Information and Event Management" doesn't do the space justice. I'm not talking about the "information" vs "event" debate -- it's the "Security" part of it that I have a bit of a problem with. Log management doesn't really capture the essence of it either, as Greg Shipley pointed out in his recent Network World article, especially since we're dealing with all sorts of asset and vulnerability information too. For a start, labeling these tools solely as security tools sets expectations about what these tools are best at....

Last Friday I spent the morning in the company of a lawyer from a top international law firm. Once we'd marvelled that the sun had finally deemed to make an appearance over the grey skies of London, our conversation turned to the rather weightier subject of data privacy. We've been doing a lot of work around using ISO27002 as a framework best practice in developing and deploying a robust information security strategy. As part of that work, I and my "Evangelist" colleagues have taken a stab at mapping various regulations against this "gold standard" in order to help customers understand where overlaps, or indeed gaps, may occur between these various regs...

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With users wanting more real-time, self-service options, many organizations have migrated their services to remote channels including the Internet or Call Centers but these services and benefits come with added risks of fraud and identity theft.  Knowledge-based authentication (KBA) offers customers the opportunity to benefit from remote interactions with stronger security as well as the added convenience of real-time authentication. Learn more in this week's podcast. In other news, we bid a fond farewell to co-host Matt Buckley.