The Schellman Blog

Despite years of preparation and billions of dollars in spending, today’s businesses still aren’t prepared for cyber-attacks. Just turn on the evening news and you’ll be greeted with the name of the latest company to suffer an attack.

The more advanced technology gets, the more chief information security officers have to worry about. And with hackers waging significant wars on major organizations like JPMorgan Chase and Anthem, their job has become more important than ever.

The ultimate goal of a compliance program is not only to make sure your organization meets the requirements for compliance, but to also ensure employees do the right thing. But it can be difficult to determine the success of your organization’s compliance. What do you measure? How often do you measure? What do you focus on?

The Health Information Trust Alliance is a U.S.-based organization that works with healthcare, technology and information security leaders to establish a Common Security Framework (CSF). A CSF is a body of controls for all organizations to follow to create, access, store and exchange private or regulated data. The Health Information Trust Alliance believes security should be a core pillar of health information systems and exchanges, not an obstacle to be hurtled, hence its mission to normalize security controls via the CSF. The CSF includes:

If you remember the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the villain Davy Jones cuts his heart from his chest and locks it away, hiding it from the world and protecting it from the ravages of grief. Bit of a drastic action if you ask us, but we—like most people—can understand taking serious lengths to protect the things we care about. That includes information. In this day and age of the Internet, where so much of life takes place, it can be tough to safeguard such data, especially when malicious attackers are constantly seeking to steal it and take advantage.

When the Romans perfected aqueducts, those channels that transported fresh water from the source to established cities and towns became the backbone of those areas. Though the Romans were excellent civil engineers, the creation and implementation of aqueducts still required a lot of planning—projects could consist of different elements like pipes, tunnels, canals, and bridges, as well as combinations of these.

Overview In the last 30 days, the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO) has published guidance for both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. The updated guidance comes on the heels of PCI mandating the enhanced penetration testing requirements within its requirement 11.3 as part of the 3.0, now 3.1, version of the DSS. These augmented PCI requirements, introduced in the fall of 2013, took effect on June 30th. For many cloud service providers this means the requirements for vulnerability scanning and penetration testing are more thorough and will require additional resources for planning, executing and remediating findings. This article will walk through the updates and discuss the differentiation between FedRAMP and the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS).

In the last 12 months, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has made great strides in enhancing their CSA Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) Program. In brief, the STAR Program is a publicly available registry designed to recognize assurance requirements and maturity levels of cloud service providers (CSPs). Prior to issuing the guidance for STAR Certification and STAR Attestation, a CSP could only perform a self-assessment, which meant completing the Consensus Assessments Initiative questionnaire (CAIQ) and making the responses publicly available on the CSA Register. The CAIQ was completed in several different ways and the content varied from short answers to full-page responses. It was relevant information but not independently validated. This created a path for the STAR Certification and STAR Attestation Programs.