Ready or not ?
In a couple of weeks time I’ll be off to Singapore, missing the Malaysian GP (but flying over it), to attend the next ISO/IEC SC27 meeting. Another week of sitting in meeting rooms in an exotic location.
While there, I’ll be proposing some new work that the UK delegation feels is necessary to complement the existing work on ISO 27037 (Identification, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence). Our view is that 27037 represents the middle of a 3-stage sub-process in Information Security Incident handling.
By the time you need to collect potential evidence, and incident has already occurred – and in order to be able to collect useful material you need a plan. Our view is that IS Incident Investigation should start with proper planning, then move on to collection and finally analysis & reporting. All of which should be properly underpinned by a robust validation & verification mechanism.
So – we are going to propose that some new work on IS Incident Investigation Readiness should be conducted, with a view to including it in ISO 27035 (Security Incident Management). Why there rather than in 27037 or a new standard ?
Well – Investigation is just one possible response to an incident – a common and useful one, but not the only one, so it makes sense to have it included in the management standard, which already includes risk assessment & management. Planning needs to come from an understanding of possible incidents and the systems which can be affected. Also, we know that many companies, particularly SMEs, will need to outsource the collection & analysis stages – which is perfectly acceptable – but still need to do their own planning to ensure that the organisation they call in can understand the nature of the incident and the systems affected, and that the methods to be employed in stages 2 & 3 meet the requirements of the plan.
I think it’s necessary work – certainly based on reports I’ve heard over the years from companies who complain that intellectual property breaches and acquisition of commercially sensitive data have not been investigated or prosecuted properly. In every case I’ve considered there has been a failing from day 1 on the part of the company – they didn’t take proper actions to secure the information or data, and they had no mechanism in place to prevent or investigate. As someone once said “Fail to plan and you plan to fail”.
There’s nothing really new in this – Incident Response guides recommend investigation as well as post-incident clean-up as good practice. It helps the organistion to learn from mistakes. The only real difference is that we are planning to set an international minimum standard for it – to help people understand the basic requirements.
If you haven’t already done some planning for incident investigation – why not start now ? or give me call or e-mail ? It needn’t take long, or be hugely expensive – but it could save a fortune if something untoward does happen.
P.S. – note that I haven’t said “forensic” anywhere in this note – not every investigation results in court action – sometimes it just results in improvements internally.
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Forensically sound(ing off) 