It was a hectic week in London. In case you hadn't heard its was InfoSec Europe week, but we were also busy with the SC Awards dinner (where PenTest Manager won the innovation award), Besides London, 44 café, speaking at InfoSec in the conference track, and speaking at an insurance event.
We also managed to find time to host a private customer networking lunch inside the InfoSec venue where we encouraged security and risk managers from our customer base to share their experiences and insights under chatham house rules on a number of hot topics in security. We discussed technology outsourcing risks, security awareness and education of employees amongst others. (we run these types of "sharing security insights" dinners on a semi-regular basis so if you'd like to attend one, let us know)
Insurance conventions and EU draft regulations… you might not normally associate SpiderLabs with either, but read on…
Our Global Security Report 2012 shows that data breach victims are largely unable to self-detect data compromises (only 16% of organisations self-detected they had suffered a breach according to our statistics) and also that the time lag between intrusion and detection can be very lengthy (some of the 2011 cases we worked, the initial point of intrusion dated back to 2008 and 2009).
This throws up some interesting considerations for the "cyber risk insurance" industry. Which was the subject of our joint presentation with DAC Beachcroft LLP at the International Association of Claims Professionals (www.iaclpro.com). Our insights raised a number of eye-brows, and generated lots of interesting questions around how cyber insurance products might need to be improved to reflect these realities. (we will be working on a follow up blog post to cover some of these off).
Some of the stats discussed above also have implications when considering the EU draft data protection regulation which will amongst other things, legally compel breached organisations throughout the EU to notify the local data protection agency, as well as the affected persons. Trustwave SpiderLabs EMEA Director, John Yeo received some press coverage on this subject in a recent Financial Times article (http://on.ft.com/IiIcbV, free registration required).
As the proposed regulation is not yet law, there will undoubtedly be some changes yet to come. However astute organisations are already starting to think about what they will need to do better to not get caught out by its introduction.
Conversely, not being able to understand what malicious/suspicious activities are occurring within your IT environment probably isn't a great starting point from a due-diligence perspective, but we know from the low data-breach self-detection rates this is the reality for many organizations…