At a presentation at the University of Minnesota this morning, National Institute of Standards and Technology Fellow Ron Ross announced the publication of a new set of systems security engineering guidelines designed to help improve information security. NIST Special Publication 800-160 was released in draft form and is now available for public comment. You can download the publication here: "Systems Security Engineering: An Integrated Approach to Building Trustworthy Resilient Systems." Ross said the announcement was made at the university to highlight where the skills needed to combat tomorrow's cyber security challenges will come from. He said the University of Minnesota's Technological Leadership Institute represents a model ...
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Ron Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and leader of the Federal Information Security Management Act Implementation Project, will announce new draft cyber security guidelines at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday. The guidelines are contained within "Special Publication 800-160, Systems Security Engineering: An Integrated Approach to Building Trustworthy Resilient Systems." They were written to help both private- and public-sector officials build more resilient IT infrastructures. Ross is the principal architect of the NIST Risk Management Framework and leads the Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Working Group, an effort to develop a unified information security framework for the federal ...
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Following recent high profile data breaches, many companies are wondering what terms and conditions should be in vendor contracts. That is great question to ask. Many companies – big and small – sign vendor contracts without considering the data security issues. Often times, a contract that is “small potatoes” from a dollar standpoint has the potential to create a disproportionate level of risk. (Consider, for example, a company hired to empty your company’s shredder bin.)  Such contracts often get signed without careful review, putting companies at risk. While each company should get individualized legal advice, here are six things that ...
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Symantec recently released its latest Internet Security Threat Report, which looks back at data from last year and offers an analysis of what happened. Not surprisingly, the company labeled 2013 “The Year of the Mega Breach.” “The total number of breaches in 2013 was 62 percent greater than in 2012 with 253 total breaches. It was also larger than the 208 breaches in 2011. But even a 62 percent increase does not truly reflect the scale of the breaches in 2013. Eight of the breaches in 2013 exposed more than 10 million identities each. In 2012 only one breach exposed over ...
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For a period of time last month, the most popular new paid Android app on the Google Play store was antivirus software. According to multiple reports, it was also a scam. Both facts tell us something about the digital world we're living in today. First, the threat of cyber crime is prevelent enough that antivirus software can top the charts of a popular online marketplace (although whether all the downloads for this particular app were legitimate is hard to know). Second, when it comes to cyber crime, no one — not even Google, one of the most powerful companies in the ...
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