Roger Halbheer on Security
That’s not a bad start of the day, reading such a headline from a Forrester analyst. I am often asked, how far we are going to drive security within Microsoft. Well, I guess here you have an answer from an outsider: Make No Mistake — Microsoft Is A Security Company Now. Even though the author…
We had a very interesting event this week with PwC in our new pop-up store at the Paradeplatz in Zurich. PwC showed from their perspective what it takes to move to the cloud and how the auditor looks at the compliance challenges in the cloud. If is good to see as well how the industry…
I think we are all in agreement that the internet as it is today is a great achievement but there needs to be a certain level of agreement between the different players what should be done and what not. On November 12th, Microsoft and other technology providers like Google, Facebook, Intel, Ericsson, Samsung, Accenture, Fujitsu,…
I was just reading an article called Does Facebook even need a CSO? – initially my reaction was (as most of yours I guess): “What a stupid question, for sure we need a CSO”. However, is this true? Do we really need a CSO? Are there other models which would work as well? What is…
It is not new, that identity will become your new perimeter, your next control pane. Still I see a lot of companies struggle with the concept and with the feeling to have the identity in the Cloud. Often, I hear the statement that they “lose control” once the identity is (at least partly) managed in…
Not only Russia, I would say…
Well, another one: CIO or C-Suite: To Whom Should the CISO Report?
At least the security community seems to agree…
I am in this business for almost two decades, which is frightening by itself. On the other hand, it is absolutely fascinating, how the security industry and especially the role of the CSO changed. I do not want to go into long stories of security itself but look at it: Initially it was all about…
Actually the article I was looking at was called: The 4 Biggest Mistakes Businesses Make Trying To Secure Endpoints. However, a major part – in my opinion – is not only true for the endpoint but for security in companies as such: Underestimating Human Error: Well it starts with the administrator who is taking wrong…
No, they are still not coming from me but this article is actually really interesting: Top 15 security predictions for 2016. A few of them are remarkable: At your criminal service (Kaspersky/Seculert) The profitability of cyber-attacks means sophisticated criminal gangs with modern organizational models and tools will replace common cyber criminals as the primary threat.…
Outsourcing IT Security : A Recipe for Success or Disaster?
Good question but looking at the resources companies can (and want to) invest in security, most probably a recipe for success
As criminals get access to better technology and as the underground markets get more active, it is not surprising that targeted attacks become more mainstream. This is something we have seen over the last 6-8 months as well as extortion threats grew in parallel. There is another trend I see talking to other organizations: Midsize…
Measuring security is a problem – and not something new. When I look at what we did at Swisscom, we are severely challenged in this area. A lot of companies measure things like incidents etc., metrics which are a complete failure in my opinion. Let’s look at the incident metric for a second. You could…
I am a fan of simple and easy to read policies. I do not think that policies consisting of several thousand documents to any good nor will they be followed.
In this context I found a noteworthy blog post: 5 Tips on Writing Security Policies
Roger
I often get asked by customers how I see the cloud in today’s environment. Honestly, I do not see it differently than I did an year ago. If I look at security in general, I see three challenges, which shape my mind: Most investments go towards protecting the infrastructure, whereas most attacks are successful on…
Trustworthy Computing in partnership with Microsoft IT, Microsoft Consulting and the product groups just released a series of videos on targeted attacked and how to defend.
I would definitely urge you to listen to them and make sure you implement the countermeasures: Targeted Attacks Video Series
Roger
I think, I blogged about this event already earlier: Years ago I was meeting a customer and was talking about the future of IT. I was telling the audience (about 10 people including the Security Officer) that there is a good chance that IT will not define a set of hardware anymore but that the…
Most companies have a lot of security policies to protect their assets and then there is the best of breed security technology added for each technical problem to solve. That way we can ensure that we did everything we could to protect the business – right? Well I do not completely think. I read this…
Typically January is the month where we are asked to make predictions on the trends for the New Year. I do not like this as I am an engineer and not a fortune tellerJ. But there are things we know and things we definitely need to drive this year. I would actually put it into…
In the recent months, we have seen more and more targeted attacks towards our customers. A lot of them use a technique called Pass the Hash. This made us publishing a paper, which explains Pass the Hash but much more important shows some fairly simple to implement mitigations against this type of attack. As they…
