Category Archives: IT Risk

Book Summary – Ben Buchanan: The Hacker and the State

Over the holiday, I took my time to read this book about state-sponsored attacks. Quite interesting if you want to model potential attacks on your company and organization. My summary in three parts distilled my learnings from reading the book.

Part 1: Espionage

Part 2: Attack

Part 3: Destabilization

Business Applications: On the Tension between Efficient Testing and Compliance

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Smooth business processes need a stable IT landscape. Thus, IT departments spend time and money on testing their business applications. But what could be a reason for a tension between efficient testing and compliance needs? Sensitive data are the reason! Testing business applications requires adequate data in the databases of test systems. …

Read here the full article of my Keynote at the 37th meeting of the special interest group testing, analysis, and verification” of the German Informatics Society.

What Developers and Testers need to know about the ISO 27001 Information Security Standard

Image courtesy ofrenjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy ofrenjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Late in 2013, the International Organization for Standardization released a new version of its ISO 27001 information security standard. The standard covers requirements applying to all organizations and ones relevant only for organizations with in-house software development and integration projects. They impact testers, developers, and release managers. This article summarizes the relevant facts and points out topics that testing and development teams have to work on.

Click here to read the article, which I published in the testing experience magazine…

Article in German: Ethische Überlegungen zum Einsatz von Data-Loss-Prevention-Tools in Unternehmen

Image courtesy of winnond at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of winnond at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Snowden, CDs von Schweizer Banken oder die fast vergessene Bonusmeilen-Affäre – manche MitarbeiterInnen ignorieren arbeitsvertragliche und strafrechtliche Normen. Mögliche Gründe sind Frust, Geltungssucht oder der Reiz des schnellen Geldes. Manchmal passiert „nur“ ein Fehler. Eine Mitarbeiterin verliert einen USB-Stick mit Forschungsergebnissen oder ein Mitarbeiter schickt eine Kundenliste an eine falsche E-Mail-Adresse. Ein solcher Datenabfluss ist in hochkompetitiven, wissensintensiven Sektoren wie der Pharma- oder Automobilbranche besonders kritisch. Änliches gilt für Branchen mit sensiblen Kundendaten. Beispiele sind das Gesundheitswesen, Banken und Versicherungen. Auch der Sicherheitssektor ist gefährdet. Wie schützen sich also Unternehmen vor einem Datenabfluss?

Hier zum vollständigen Artikel…

When Data Is a Risk – DLP Tools and Their Role within IT Departments

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Snowden is a reversal point for IT security and risk. Before him, many saw IT security as equivalent to a medieval town wall: keeping outside hackers and malicious code away from the company. Firewalls, virus scanners, and application security testing (e.g., to find SQL injections) fit the town wall approach. But Snowden was different. He was from the inside of the organization. He collected large amounts of sensitive data. Then, he got the data out of a highly secured IT organization, which had to learn from the press about the case. In this article, I will explain such data-related risks in ITdepartments and how data loss prevention (DLP) tools help to manage them.

Read/download my article as a PDF, which appeared in the February issue of the ;login: magazine from usenix.

Information security risks in test environments – two new articles in German

Image courtesy of khunaspix / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of khunaspix / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Two articles appeared in the magazine “SQ-Magazin”. Both are in German and focus on risks in test environments (Testdaten als Risikofaktor) respectively on how data loss prevention tools address them (Data-Loss-Prevention-Tools minimieren Sicherheitslücken in Testumgebungen).