Back from the dead ... and more concerned than ever!

So this blogging is harder to keep up with than I expected. I can't believe it's June already. Let me catch you up quickly on the last month:

• My company has gone through significant growth - our unique approach to security and risk assessments has really caught on and we're hiring people as quickly as we can find them. If you're a CISSP or have a similar background, please call me!
• I have attended several regional trade shows and conferences over the past month. Some were security related, but most were not. As a result, I have spent a lot of time talking with people who are not "security experts".
• I have also spent significant time speaking with IT directors and leaders in local and regional government bodies.

And after a month of talking and listening, listening and talking, here's what I see:

• Everyone seems to accept that security issues are real and that they are at risk.
• If you haven't been breached, the risk you're under is acceptable. I would be a rich man if only I had a dollar for every version of, "it won't happen to me" that I have heard.
• The security threats - particularly in the area of social engineering - are becoming more prevelent and are attacking smaller and smaller organizations. I recently ran into the president of a company in rural Pennsylvania - Amish country - whose A/R person was deceived into giving away banking information. They are a 24 person company.

Folks - what's it going to take?!?! At some point, this is going to become irresponsible behavior to keep ignoring these issues. (In fact, California is currently considering forcing companies who have been breached to cover all costs for consumers and businesses who have to deal with their information being compromised)

This blog REALLY isn't intended to be a commercial for my company. But it drives me crazy that we have the resources and ability to help protect you, your company and your customers - but you won't let us. (obviously, I don't direct that to our customers - you guys I love!) :-)

I know this sounds like a rant - and it is - but it's also a plea. As a business owner, you have a responsibility to protect your customers. Do the right thing. Your I.T. people don't have the depth - trust me - they don't. It's not their fault - I'm sure they do a great job keeping the business running. But security is a full time job and they just don't have the time.

So bring in a professional organization. If you don't like me or Pervasive Solutions - no problem. I'll even recommend some others for you if you want. But find someone you can trust and have them help you. At a minimum, here are the things you should be doing every 9 - 12 months:

• End-user security awareness training: help your employees understand the importance of security and the threats that they may face.
• External network vulnerability assessment: find out what risks exist on your network
• Network and server configuration assessment: help your I.T. team build security into your infrastructure instead of trying to bolt it on afterwards
• Policy & procedure review: establish and review your security policies and procedures, both for your I.T. team and your company as a whole, to set expectations and protect the company from compliance and litigation risks

I know these may sound like a lot. But I assure you, they aren't. For only a few thousand dollars per year, you can cover 80% of your risk with just these four steps. Certainly, I would suggest that you eventually conduct complete, thorough security and compliance risk audits which will dig deep. But don't worry about that now. Just do the basics. If you do, you'll be ahead of your peers who are still burying their head in the sand.

It's like the old joke, "if we get chased by a bear, I don't have to outrun the bear - I just have to outrun you." Make your company a smaller target - sure, you'll still be a target - but there will be bigger targets all around you.

Data Leakage: How can you prevent it?

Would it surprise you if I told you that far more than 50% of all security breaches stem from internal sources? It's true. At the end of the day, your employees pose far greater risks to your security than do any external risks.

If you are anything like most of the business owners I speak to, you're thinking, "Not MY employees. I can trust my team." Of course you can trust your team - to a point. But the fact of the matter is that security holes and breaches occur primarily due to lapses in good security practices by company employees.

Sometimes these are malicious acts, but most often, they are accidental. They come from the receptionist who leaves his password on a sticky-note under his mouse pad ... or the software engineer who leaves her laptop in the back of her unlocked car while she runs into the supermarket ... or the executive who emails files with sensitive information to her home email address so she can be productive over the weekend.

Now ask yourself again - could any of these situations happen to you?

"Data leakage" is the industry term that is used to describe these types of breaches. While you and your employees may not realize that you're doing anything dangerous, your company's and clients' data is exposed. As a business owner, you have a responsibility under law (and general ethical behavior) to adequately protect your sensitive data. So how can you prevent data leakage?

Awareness
The most important aspect to preventing data leakage is training your employees regarding behaviors that could lead to leaks. Proper training will help employees to:

• Understand how leaks occur
• Internalize how those leaks create risk for the company, their clients and themselves
• Accept responsibility for preventing leaks from their own behavior and helping other employees to avoid risky behavior as well
• Alert appropriate management should they identify potential data leaks, whether malicious or accidental

This training is necessary for ALL employees - not just your IT team. Whether they work on the loading docks, in a cube or in the corner office, each of your employees can help protect the company from data leakage.

Technology
While training is the most important aspect of preventing data leakage, there are technology solutions that can help:

• Email Controls. These solutions include limiting outgoing attachment sizes, lexicons that analyze outgoing email for confidential information and email encryption tools. The point is, most email traffic is inherently insecure. So the first step is to limit the sending of confidential data to a bare minimum, and second, to protect that data as it is sent.
• Device Controls. Often times, malicious data leakage occurs when an employee downloads confidential data to an easily transportable device - like a USB key drive. Your IT administrators can regulate use of these devices to prevent such incidents from occurring.
• Data Controls. Most importantly, your confidential data should only be accessible by employees who MUST have access to it - and then they should only have access to the specific data that they need. Too often, we discover databases and systems where people throughout the organization are given carte blanche permissions to access anything and everything. You should be regularly reviewing who has access to what resources and whether they still require such access.

Policies & Procedures
Finally, you need to establish a documented set of security policies and procedures. This should be a comprehensive collection of materials that establish the do's and don't's for how your employees treat confidential materials. Documenting these policies and making them available to your employees accomplishes several key goals:

• You underscore to your employees how critical security issues are to the business and set a consistent expectation for employee behavior
• You provide an easily accessible resource should an employee have a question - this is especially important following the awareness training described above
• You create a document trail that protects you from some liability in the event that an incident occurs and provides a basis for employee discipline when necessary

Data leakage has injured many, many companies - from Fortune 500 enterprises to 5-person financial advisers and physician practices. It's not expensive to protect yourself - it just requires a commitment on your part, some hard work and, for many mid-size companies, the assistance of a knowledgeable advisor. If you feel your company may be at risk, send me an email and we can talk further about steps you can take to protect yourself.

Josh

Microsoft Exchange: In-house or hosted?

After my eDiscovery post, I received several emails asking questions about email archiving, email security and the eDiscovery requirements. However, the most intriguing of these questions was brought up by David Spark, a fellow blogger. David was interested in discussing the decision companies need to make regarding hosting their own Microsoft Exchange implementation or outsourcing it.

It's a great question. For many SMBs, their email system is an absolutely critical piece of their infrastructure. So, if it's that critical, it should stay inside, right? You should trust your own people to maintain it and make sure it is always available, right? Well, maybe not.

What do you need to make sure your Exchange environment supports your business needs and compliance requirements?

1. It needs to be available.
2. It needs to be secure.
3. It needs to be redundant.
4. It needs to be archived (to support eDiscovery requirements).

To reach these goals with a high degree of proficiency, it requires you to invest in hardware, software, backup and archiving systems and training for your team - not to mention the labor required to perform the maintenance, account changes, security, backups and troubleshooting.

On the other hand, if you outsource your Exchange, you look to your vendor to meet these requirements. But this should be their specialty. While in-hosting requires your team to be experts in something that is NOT your core business, outsourcing allows you to take advantage of your vendor's expertise - since this IS their business.

Moreover, when you in-source, you pay ALL of the costs associated with implementing and supporting the Exchange environment. When you outsource, the vendor is able to leverage the implementation and support costs across all of their clients, which should result in significant savings to you.

But these are vague arguments. Let's take a look at a specific example.

Exchange Hosting: A Total Cost Analysis

The following comparison is a real-world examination of the costs to implement and support a complete Microsoft Exchange environment for a 250-person health care organization.

In-house Exchange Hosting Costs (36 Month Analysis)

Server (HP LS385 Cluster - Dual Core) $14,700.00
Cluster pack software $140.00
24 X 7 service pack, on-site 4 hour $3,500.00

Backup software Upgrade $35,000.00
Backup software Install $14,000.00
Staff training for backup software $6,000.00

Windows 2003 Exchange Cluster edition $3,500.00
Windows 2003 Exchange CALs $18,750.00
Exchange upgrade, install, migration $8,000.00
Outlook upgrade licenses $37,500.00

Symantec Archive Evault $22,000.00
Archive server $9,700.00
Windows 2003 license $700.00
24 X 7 service pack, on-site 4 hour $1,200.00
Symantec Archive Evault install $3,000.00

Exchange training for network staff $6,000.00

.5 FTE for 3 years $120,000.00

Total $303,690.00

On the other hand, this same company was able to outsource their Exchange implementation, including archiving, email encryption (which wasn't even included in the above analysis), 24x7 support and greater redundancy than the above solution provides - all for less than $200,000!

While it's true that you have to be careful that you select the right vendor, you can take active steps to make a good choice. Your vendor should be able to guarantee specific up-time standards - at least 99.99%. Your vendor should be able to demonstrate significant security proficiency. And most importantly, your vendor MUST be able to give you at least five references who are using the same services you would be using. Make sure you speak with these references and ask them about their experiences with up-time and support issues.

So there it is. The numbers provided here scale pretty similarly, whether you are a larger or smaller organization. If you're an SMB and you're implementing Exchange internally - I strongly suggest that you consider looking into outsourcing.

This is admittedly a high-level analysis of this issue. I started this post by introducing you to David Spark. I'll finish it that way, too. Among his other act ivies, David is managing a Microsoft-sponsored wiki white paper on this very topic. Check it out: http://www.mehsreport.com/.

If you have additional questions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Feel free to post comments or to email me at jbouk@pervasivesolutions.net.

Josh

Why your data is more likely to be stolen than your car

If you decided to shed your morals and take up a life of crime, how would you do it? Would you rob banks? Would you steal cars? If you're a reasonably intelligent crook, you're going to carefully consider all of the risk vs. reward data that you can find. If you are a computer-literate crook, I'll give you one guess where you'll find the greatest reward and the lowest risk of being caught.

Cybercrime.

It's just a fact. Last night, I attended a lecture given by George Kurtz, co-author of the book, Hacking Exposed, and currently SVP at McAfee, Inc. According to George, McAfee and the hundreds of researches they employ, cybercrime is now a $105 BILLION industry. And it makes absolute sense. The criminals have become so technically innovative in the way they launch attacks that it becomes nearly impossible to track them down and arrest them.

Countries like Russia, China, India and many others with lax industrial espionage and intellectual property laws also have large numbers of impoverished people. With little law enforcement, access to the world's networks via the internet, and a glut of how-to information freely available, organized crime is training cyber-criminals by the hundreds and making millions and millions of dollars every month.

When you combine high reward, low risk and abundant opportunity, you get a form of crime that is far safer, and more profitable, than traditional crime.

Why does this matter to you? Are you thinking, "OK, but I'm just a nobody" or "My 200 person company isn't big enough to attack" or "With all the computers on the web, what is the likelihood they're going to find me?" If you are, consider this:

Gartner research indicates that between 2007 and 2010, mid-market American companies will become the primary targets of a large percentage of cybercrime.

Again, the reasons are simple:

1. Most network attacks are not targetted attacks against a particular business. Rather, they operate like a fishing net, thrown into the ocean to see what it catches.
2. Enterprise-level organizations, generally, have spent the last several years improving their security infrastructure so that they don't get caught in these nets.
3. The SMB sector lacks the resources and expertise to defend themselves. You may have an IT team, but unless you have at least one resource dedicated to security, I will guarantee you that your IT team is not adequately protecting you. They're just too overloaded and don't have the depth of security knowledge.
4. Here's the clincher: The crooks know all these things. So if you're a crook and you know it will take you a lifetime to penetrate a Fortune 500 network, but you can breach 100 SMBs every WEEK, where is the quickest return on your investment?

That's why you should be concerned. Security threats are real. And if you aren't a target today, you'll be one soon. You need to be prepared.

One quick story - among other things, my company performs security assessments. In one such assessment at a mid-size hospital, our ethical hacking team was able to penetrate the network and access actual patient care devices in the infant ICU. These devices were keeping babies alive. And yet, our team COULD have crashed those machines with one keystroke. Had that been a real hacker ... as a father of three, I don't want to think about it.

Security is about more than protecting data. No matter what business you're in, you have information and systems whose breach could materially impact the lives and livelihoods of you, your employees and your clients. I encourage you to make certain you're doing everything you can to protect them.

Josh

Welcome to Security & Compliance for the SMB...

Thanks for stopping by! This blog will be the home for advice, commentary and discussion regarding the information security and compliance landscape as it pertains to America's small and medium size businesses. I intend to discuss a wide variety of topics and hope that you will also contribute to the discussion.

Before we get started, a little about me...

I am a partner in the firm, Pervasive Solutions, LLC. Located in Rochester, NY, Pervasive Solutions provides information security and compliance services and solutions to the SMB world - particularly in the Healthcare, Banking/Financial Services, Legal and Government/Non-Profit industries. We are passionate about protecting our customers from the increasing threats that SMBs face and helping them find reasonable solutions to the mountain of legislation and regulation that seems to continue to proliferate.

Prior to joining Pervasive Solutions, I led several other organizations including a 300-person e-learning company and the strategic consulting division of an $800M publicly-traded enterprise. I also started a software company in 1999, but it wasn't exactly successful. :)

Over the last twelve years, my clients have included the largest of the large and the smallest of the small. But in the last few years, I continued to notice that while large companies were investing in protecting their businesses, systems and data, their smaller counterparts seemed oblivious to the very real threats to their businesses. As I would speak with these business leaders, it was clear - they ALWAYS fell into one of two camps:

1. They didn't know that they needed protection and didn't understand the regulatory requirements facing them OR
2. They didn't believe they were big enough to be a victim

Unfortunately, I also ran into business owner after business owner that had been burned by employee theft, data leakage and other such problems. Some lost their business. Some survived but experienced significant pain.

And thus, I jumped into security and compliance with two feet - my ultimate goal being to educate and protect as many small businesses as I can. I am a firm believer that the future of America is dependent upon a strong, innovative, growth-enabled SMB environment. But if they are going to succeed, they need to be protected and compliant. I hope this blog will help.

Josh