Cyber Compliance & Beyond

Vulnerabilities are everywhere and on every IT asset within an organization. This makes vulnerability management one of the most important – if not the most important – risk mitigation activities an organization undertakes. But, the complexities inherent in many organizations combined with the sheer number of vulnerabilities leaves many not knowing where to even begin when it comes to vulnerability management. On today’s episode, we’ll demystify vulnerability management by defining some context, outlining an effective vulnerabilities management program, discussing potential challenges, tying it all to compliance, and decoupling vulnerability management from the inherent complexities.

Today’s guest is Andrew Overmyer, Security Assessor, subject matter expert, and general cybersecurity jack-of-all-trades at Kratos. During our conversation, we distill this often-nebulous concept into the concrete tenets necessary to build an effective program to drive vulnerability remediation efforts.

Resources:

· The Core Tenets of Vulnerability Management

o Asset Management: a tool or set of tools accompanied by a process that build and maintain an accurate asset inventory; an asset inventory must include but not be limited to network segments and IT assets across all types

o Patch Management: a tool or set of tools accompanied by a process that supports identifying and applying patches

o Vulnerability Scanning: a tool or set of tools accompanied by a process that support identifying vulnerabilities on IT assets; vulnerability scans must be run with credentials, to the greatest extent possible, to fully identify vulnerabilities present

o Compliance Scanning: a tool or set of tools accompanied by a process that support identifying misconfigurations on IT assets; misconfigurations are deviations from a defined baseline (e.g., Center for Internet Security benchmarks)

· Vulnerability Scanning Schedule

o Daily: Asset scans to identify assets on the network; these are not vulnerability scans, but rather simple scans to identify assets on the network

o Weekly: Vulnerability scans of all assets on the network

o Monthly: Compliance scans of all applicable assets on the network

· CVSS: Common Vulnerability Scoring System Version 4.0

· EPSS: Exploit Prediction Scoring System

· SSVC: Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization

IT support is tricky for most businesses, especially for those not in the IT business. Thus, IT is a cost of doing business and a high cost at that. High costs drive down profits. Less profit makes it harder for businesses to invest in the products or services that they’re making and selling. Retaining IT staff is even more difficult. This is due to the extremely low unemployment rate and the higher-than-average annual salary. These two factors almost guarantee that IT staff hired by non-IT businesses will eventually get a better offer some place else. To mitigate the problem with IT staff, businesses have turned to outsourcing to managed service providers or external service providers. By doing so businesses are giving up the information necessary to make well-informed choices, instead choosing to trust the IT service providers they’re buying from. This asymmetry of information creates a market phenomenon called a market for lemons. A market for lemons phenomenon exists when sellers hold more knowledge than buyers. Because buyers are price-sensitive and are only willing to pay a certain price the market becomes distorted such that high-quality sellers are gobbled up quickly and the market is left with lemons. In sum, the market for lemons works to drive quality out of the market.

Today’s guest is Andy Paul. Andy is an engineer, data privacy professional and a Certified CMMC Assessor from Gray Analytics with more than 15 years of experience helping firms design, implement and secure everything from globally spanning networks to small boutique and highly specified and regulated networks. During our conversation, we discuss the current situation in the IT services market, the market for lemons phenomenon, how the CMMC ecosystem is setup to alleviate the problems that markets for lemons introduce, and how you can outsource confidently.

Resources:

Links:

· George Akerlof – The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Aug. 1970), pp. 488-500

· Cyber AB Marketplace

Supply chain security is not new, though it certainly feels as though it is. Thanks to globalization, supply chains are ever growing in their depth, complexity, and interconnectedness. Unfortunately, like so many other systems, security of supply chains hasn’t been at the top of the list of things to consider when evaluating supply chains. Understandably, economics led the way. A supply chain exists to foster economic growth and profit-making. None of these are bad but there’s a painful irony: the less security is considered, the greater the costs, which drives down growth and profit-making. Costs aren’t just financial, either. The cost of losing a competitive edge is significant but almost impossible to quantify in dollars. It runs much deeper. As data theft has proliferated on an unprecedented scale, the need for securing supply chains has begun it’s rise to the top of our consciousness. The intriguing thing about supply chain security is that it isn’t all that different than traditional risk management activities.

Today’s guest is John Santore, Director of Cybersecurity Services here at Kratos. Together, we’ll dive into supply chain security. We’ll outline what a supply chain is, what to consider when evaluating your supply chain, some of the challenges you might encounter along the way and we’ll outline a basic supply chain risk management approach.

Resources:

The core tenants of a supply chain risk management approach:

• Inventory your supply chain
• Ensure strong relationships are in place with those in your supply chain
• Develop criteria for evaluating the risk of suppliers within your organization
• Work with your suppliers to obtain the information necessary to perform the evaluation
• Develop a process for scrutinizing suppliers that are identified as high-risk
• Repeat the process on a defined frequency
• Ensure that it is applied as part of any supplier intake

Links:

• NIST SP 800-161: Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Practices for Systems and Organizations
• C-SCRM Factsheet
• NIST SP 800-218: Secure Software Development Framework
• Executive Order 14028
• OMB M-22-18
• OMB M-23-16

The number of compliance frameworks is seemingly endless. The lack of standards is problematic enough. Even more problematic, however, is how the compliance frameworks overlaps with one another. When it comes to International Trade and Export Compliance, the problem is overlap is accentuated by the fact that there is not a definitive ‘framework’ for export compliance. Nearly everything is determined on a case-by-case basis.

Today’s guest is Sara Hougland, Director of Trade Compliance here at Kratos. During our conversation, we cover export compliance at a high level, discuss the concept of “due diligence”, distinguish ITAR from EAR (and vice versa), and talk about the specifics of export compliance. As mentioned above, ITAR compliance is not a one-size fits all approach. Sara brings her extensive knowledge and experience in the field to provide great information on what, exactly, “ITAR compliant” means and how it benefits an organization.

Some recent estimates have postulated that data is now the world’s most valuable asset. Unlike other assets, like oil, for example, data proliferates on a staggering scale. In other words, it doesn’t seem to be finite, subject the law of scarcity. This hammers home the importance of answering the question that each of you are wrestling with: how do I protect all this data? A simple answer to this question is encryption. But any simple answer has you immediately asking more questions: what encryption should I use? How should I configure it? How can I be sure it is adequate? And, perhaps most interestingly, is it possible to future proof my data protection techniques?

Today’s guest is Evgeny Gervis, CEO of SafeLogic. SafeLogic, founded in 2012, is a leading cryptographic solutions provider. Their validated, holistic, and interoperable cryptographic solutions enable enduring privacy and trust in the ever-changing digital world. Used by many of the world’s top technology firms, SafeLogic expedites and streamlines the adoption of FIPS 140-validated classical and post-quantum cryptography.

Beyond simply using encryption to protect data, we dive into the intersection of compliance and encryption, specifically the role of the FIPS standard for encryption. While Evgeny provides technical expertise, I share some important compliance guidance and nuance we’ve learned from years of supporting our clients in evaluating FIPS 140 implementations. To close, Evgeny and I discuss the future of encryption, standards, and the likely effect of quantum computing.