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Since the European Union (EU) signed the second version of the Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive in December 2022, there has been a real frenzy all around Europe about it. NIS2 is now… Read more on Cisco Blogs
NIS2 compliance for industrial networks: Are you ready?
It’s been my pleasure to work alongside the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (CIPL) for over a decade to advocate for privacy to be respected as a fundamental human right and managed by organizations as a business imperative. CIPL works with industry leaders, regulators, and policymakers to deliver leading practices and solutions for privacy and responsible data use around the world.
Our organizations share the belief that privacy is key to trust and provides a critical competitive advantage for those who get it right. As privacy professionals, we live and breathe the importance of privacy every day and understand its value. We must help business leaders and other key stakeholders recognize and realize data privacy’s true worth and invest appropriately — beyond just meeting legal or compliance requirements.
We’re excited today to share this new, jointly-published research report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs. This report offers insights into the material business benefits that organizations are realizing from the time, monetary, and resource investments they have applied to building their Data Privacy Management Programs (DPMPs).
Here are some of the key findings:
Customers want accountability. While organizations are expected to meet their legal, compliance, and data security requirements, customers also demand organizations to be responsible stewards of their personal data. DPMPs not only enable organizations to gain a competitive edge, they empower them to earn and grow confidence and trust in the business.
Significant benefits from investing in DPMPs. Risk mitigation and compliance benefits, like avoiding regulatory scrutiny and fines, minimizing breaches, and evading damage to reputation, are among the most substantial benefits experienced by organizations that implement a DPMP. Other tangible benefits include greater agility, operational efficiency, and making the organization more attractive to investors.
Strong, attractive returns from DPMPs. More than half of organizations surveyed experienced at least $1 million in benefit from investing in privacy over the past year, with 28% realizing over $10 million in benefit.
Widespread Use of Privacy Maturity Models. Most organizations are using some form of a privacy maturity model to show accountability, including the CIPL Accountability Framework, ISO standards, Generally Accepted Privacy Principles, and the NIST Privacy Framework, among others. And CIPL members had an average score of 4.13 out of 5 with respect to implementing the seven elements of organizational accountability as described in the report.
There is considerable interest in further understanding the value DPMPs bring to their organization. Discussions about privacy and how DPMPs positively impact organizations will continue to be an increasing area of focus for corporate leadership, including the C-suite and at the Board level.
These findings offer valuable information and perspective for those building and operationalizing privacy. We’ll continue to research and share other qualitative and quantitative evidence that highlights privacy’s growing priority and value for organizations and the individuals they serve.
Check out this report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs and more related privacy research on consumer and organizational perspectives on the Cisco Trust Center.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
A nonprofit organization is suing the state of Massachusetts on behalf of thousands of low-income families who were collectively robbed of more than a $1 million in food assistance benefits by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes across the state. Federal law bars states from replacing these benefits using federal funds, and a recent rash of skimming incidents nationwide has disproportionately affected those receiving food assistance via state-issued prepaid debit cards.
The Massachusetts SNAP benefits card looks more like a library card than a payment card.
On Nov. 4, The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of low-income families whose Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were stolen from their accounts. The SNAP program serves over a million people in Massachusetts, and 41 million people nationally.
“Over the past few months, thieves have stolen over a million SNAP dollars from thousands of Massachusetts families – putting their nutrition and economic stability at risk,” the MLRI said in a statement on the lawsuit. “The criminals attach a skimming device on a POS (point of sale) terminal to capture the household’s account information and PIN. The criminals then use that information to make a fake card and steal the SNAP benefits.”
In announcing the lawsuit, the MRLI linked to a story KrebsOnSecurity published last month that examined how skimming thieves increasingly are targeting SNAP payment card holders nationwide. The story looked at how the vast majority of SNAP benefit cards issued by the states do not include the latest chip technology that makes it more difficult and expensive for thieves to clone them.
The story also highlighted how SNAP cardholders usually have little recourse to recover any stolen funds — even in unlikely cases where the victim has gathered mountains of proof to show state and federal officials that the fraudulent withdrawals were not theirs.
Deborah Harris is a staff attorney at the MLRI. Harris said the goal of the lawsuit is to force Massachusetts to reimburse SNAP skimming victims using state funds, and to convince The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) — which funds the program that states draw from — to change its policies and allow states to replace stolen benefits with federal funds.
“Ultimately we think it’s the USDA that needs to step up and tell states they have a duty to restore the stolen benefits, and that USDA will cover the cost at least until there is better security in place, such as chip cards,” Harris told KrebsOnSecurity.
“The losses we’re talking about are relatively small in the scheme of total SNAP expenditures which are billions,” she said. “But if you are a family that can’t pay for food because you suddenly don’t have money in your account, it’s devastating for the family.”
The USDA has not said it will help states restore the stolen funds. But on Oct. 31, 2022, the agency released guidance (PDF) whose primary instructions were included in an appendix titled, Card Security Options Available to Households. Notably, the USDA did not mention the idea of shifting to chip-based SNAP benefits cards.
The recently issued USDA guidance.
“The guidance generally continues to make households responsible for preventing the theft of their benefits as well as for suffering the loss when benefits are stolen through no fault of the household,” Harris said. “Many of the recommendations are not practical for households who don’t have a smartphone to receive text messages and aren’t able to change their PIN after each transaction and keep track of the new PIN.”
Harris said three of the four recommendations are not currently available in Massachusetts, and they are very likely not currently available in other states. For example, she said, Massachusetts households do not have the option of freezing or locking their cards between transactions. Nor do they receive alerts about transactions. And they most certainly don’t have any way to block out-of-state transactions.
“Perhaps these are options that [card] processors and states could provide, but they are not available now as far as we know,” Harris said. “Most likely they would take time to implement.”
The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) recently published Five Ways State Agencies Can Support EBT Users at Risk of Skimming. CLASP says while it is true states can’t use federal funds to replace benefits unless the loss was due to a “system error,” states could use their own funds.
“Doing so will ensure families don’t have to go without food, gas money, or their rent for the month,” CLASP wrote.
That would help address the symptoms of card skimming, but not a root cause. Hardly anyone is suggesting the obvious, which is to equip SNAP benefit cards with the same security technology afforded to practically everyone else participating in the U.S. banking system.
There are several reasons most state-issued SNAP benefit cards do not include chips. For starters, nobody says they have to. Also, it’s a fair bit more expensive to produce chip cards versus plain old magnetic stripe cards, and many state assistance programs are chronically under-funded. Finally, there is no vocal (or at least well-heeled) constituency advocating for change.
A copy of the class action complaint filed by the MLRI is available here.
Security that is hard to deploy and complex to manage needs to become a distant memory if businesses are to be resilient through times of uncertainty. Even something as critical as a firewall, the sentinel in the security stack, can often require a lengthy setup, ongoing maintenance, and disjointed management. Over the long run, these additional costs accrue and can have a negative impact on security programs. When budgets are constrained, these effects can be exacerbated and become a barrier to providing the level of security organizations need to protect the integrity of their business.
At Cisco we have a rich history overcoming this challenge with Cisco Secure Firewall. Forrester Consulting recently conducted an independent analysis of organizations using Secure Firewall. The study showed that customers realized a 195% in total ROI when managing their firewall fleet through Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC). Improvements to security workflows through the FMC, which include deploying, managing, and updating policy, were the largest contributing factor to the tune of $18.6 million in total benefits achieved. The Forrester study states that “organizations reduced network operation work streams by up to 95%. Thanks to the latest features of Cisco Secure Firewall and the ease of management via Firewall Management Center.”
We are not done. Today we boost productivity even further, with the new cloud-delivered version of FMC within the Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) platform. This leap brings all the features from FMC into the cloud and consolidates firewall management. Organizations save time, increase security, and gain a positive ROI. With cloud-delivered FMC, manually managing updates is a thing of the past. An agile delivery of updates is built in to ensure uptime, so you can focus on your most important priorities — protecting the integrity of the business with increased firewall capabilities. The CDO platform unifies the lifecycle of policy management across multiple Cisco security solutions in our cloud. By bringing the FMC experience directly into CDO, end users enjoy the same look, functionality, and workflow as on-premises and virtual versions of Firewall Management Center. Without the usual learning curve within a new “experience,” migration to the cloud is simplified. Organizations can now propel cloud-first strategies and enable the rapid delivery of firewall services no matter where your network may roam.
“Moving FMC into CDO isn’t just about cost savings for today and powering security resilience with flexibility and choice. We are also putting a firm foot into the near future for SASE and achieving unified policy across the multienvironment IT.”– Justin Buchanan, Sr. Director Product Management, Cisco Secure
Traditionally, customers have deployed FMC as a physical or virtual appliance. Now in addition to cost savings, security resilience is driving an increased need for hybrid multicloud deployments. Leveraging public cloud infrastructures, organizations are becoming more cost efficient — cloud-delivered applications reduce change management and operational overhead. But they are also ensuring organizations have the agility required to deploy network security workloads where and how they want to remain agile and adapt to uncertainty.
Hybrid work and business continuity is made possible within the CDO platform. A cloud-based and centralized platform unifies firewall management across the Cisco Secure and Meraki portfolio and provides the foundation to unify policy across the distributed network all within a platform that is built to drive increased ROI and preserve the user experience. IT can control and manage firewall policy from anywhere along with a low-touch provisioning and onboarding process for branch and firewall deployments. The cloud-delivered FMC integrates with Cisco Secure Analytics & Logging, and, as a result, enhanced data retention and meeting stringent compliance requirements has never been easier. Whether you are part of a smaller organization or a larger enterprise, you control how many Cisco Secure Firewalls are managed through the cloud-delivered FMC, and easily scale that number. So, when it comes to simplicity at scale, CDO is your answer.
To learn more about Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, visit our product page and read the entire Forrester report here.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
The introduction of the MITRE ATT&CK evaluations is a welcomed addition to the third-party testing arena. The ATT&CK framework, and the evaluations in particular, have gone such a long way in helping advance the security industry as a whole, and the individual security products serving the market.
The insight garnered from these evaluations is incredibly useful. But let’s admit, for everyone except those steeped in the analysis, it can be hard to understand. The information is valuable, but dense. There are multiple ways to look at the data and even more ways to interpret and present the results (as no doubt you’ve already come to realize after reading all the vendor blogs and industry articles!) We have been looking at the data for the past week since it published, and still have more to examine over the coming days and weeks.
The more we assess the information, the clearer the story becomes, so we wanted to share with you Trend Micro’s 10 key takeaways for our results:
1. Looking at the results of the first run of the evaluation is important:
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2. There is a hierarchy in the type of main detections – Techniques is most significant
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https://attackevals.mitre.org/APT29/detection-categories.html
3. More alerts does not equal better alerting – quite the opposite
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4. Managed Service detections are not exclusive
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5. Let’s not forget about the effectiveness and need for blocking!
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6. We need to look through more than the Windows
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7. The evaluation shows where our product is going
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8. This evaluation is helping us make our product better
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9. MITRE is more than the evaluation
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10. It is hard not to get confused by the fud!
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The post Trend Micro’s Top Ten MITRE Evaluation Considerations appeared first on .
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