Dave Cullinane

Dealing with a security issue itself is clearly the priority - stopping the damage and doing triage. Once things are under control, a more detailed analysis should take place.

One of the ongoing complaints I hear regularly is that it is difficult to cost justify security spend. Preaching "FUD" (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is certainly not the way. While FUD may help you get funding one time, anyone running a business will quickly ask how much the money spent last time has reduced their risk profile — and why do they now need to spend more. We need to be able to answer those questions clearly and in business terms.

Three or four years ago Howard Schmidt commented that we should have moved away from username and password as an authentication mechanism years before. I recall nodding in agreement with his statement. So I was hardly surprised when the The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued its guidance calling for the use of second-factor authentication in online banking. In the view of many vendors, this guidance — after an earlier FDIC advisory on internet banking security — “represents a definitive step toward eliminating single-factor authentication by financial institutions.” There are alternative views.

I had the pleasure of attending a session with a "guturist" recently — a gentleman by the name of Michael Tchong. He spends much of his time analyzing trends and patterns in technology, human behavior and other areas and uses that information to forecast future trends and directions. While his technology and business predictions were fascinating, one of the comments he made struck me as particularly appropriate to those of us in information security:
"If you can't do it for the same cost or lower — outsource it."

There is a great deal of legislation being proposed that could have a big impact on information security, most of it the result of concerns over ID theft.