Skip to main content

IPICS Risk Assessment Slides

These are my slides on Information Security Risk Assessment, presented at the Intensive Programme on Information and Communication Security (IPICS). The topics covered are: the System-Holistic Approach to ICT Security; Risk Assessment approaches, strategies & terminology; Three Card RAG / Obstacle Poker; OCTAVE® - Operationally Critical Threat, Asset and Vulnerability Evaluation.

A PDF of the slides can be downloaded from here. (updated)

I will publish more information on the topics covered in due course (and if anyone asks). However, more information on Three Card RAG / Obstacle Poker can be found in a previous blog post.

Comments

Popular Posts

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most...

Anti-Phishing Sender Verification with GrIDsure

I have tried out GrIDsure with a set of users now to see how easy it was to use. I was using the Windows client 2-factor authentication solution I blogged about here . (If you don't know their product you must read either their website or my other blog post above before reading this post as it won't make a lot of sense otherwise.) It turns out that the users had no problem setting it up and using the login - no training required other than a simple explanation of how it works. Doing this trial reminded me of discussions I had with GrIDsure about their Enterprise version of their product, which is fairly new and has more features being added all the time. One feature that I thought was noteworthy is their anti-phishing verification. Phishing, as you will know from here , is a big problem and is often spread by obscured links in emails, such as http://www.microsoft.com.phishers.org/ , which has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but is just a sub-domain of phishers.org....

Web Hosting Security Policy & Guidelines

I have seen so many websites hosted and developed insecurely that I have often thought I should write a guide of sorts for those wanting to commission a new website. Now I have have actually been asked to develop a web hosting security policy and a set of guidelines to give to project managers for dissemination to developers and hosting providers. So, I thought I would share some of my advice here. Before I do, though, I have to answer why we need this policy in the first place? There are many types of attack on websites, but these can be broadly categorised as follows: Denial of Service (DoS), Defacement and Data Breaches/Information Stealing. Data breaches and defacements hurt businesses' reputations and customer confidence as well as having direct financial impacts. But surely any hosting provider or solution developer will have these standards in place, yes? Well, in my experience the answer is no. It is true that they are mostly common sense and most providers will conform...