Data Loss and How Not to Spin a Security Breach
This is no way to start the week. We’re all supposed to be psyched for all the latest and greatest security tools and buzz coming out of the RSA security conference but then I find this hit-in-the-head-with-a-frying-pan little ditty on TJX-scale data breaches: (thanks to Brian Krebs’ Security Fix at the Washington Post for this memorable one):
Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, sums up their point of view: "Most of the larger banks have very sophisticated, round-the-clock fraud monitoring systems in place, but a lot of the smaller institutions don't have those systems," he said. "These institutions have abdicated their responsibilities in this regard, and now they want retailers to pay for it."
No I didn’t take this quote from a freshman essay demonstrating the use of irony. It seems that a retailer exposing tens of millions of customer accounts is the bank’s fault. Now that I think of it, my bout of male pattern baldness started about the same time I opened my first checking account … damn that Bank of America.
Seriously though, data loss prevention is a big problem. Mike Rothman at Security Incite is more pessimistic than I am about the collective RSA response to data breaches: He thinks they’ll be a lot of talk but not much action:
There will be a lot of noise about back-end and data center security. I tend to all this "information security," and given all the privacy breaches - this will be big news. This is last year's NAC. By that I mean, we will hear a lot about it, but very few solutions. The noise will be deafening at the 2008 RSA show, and maybe we'll have something to buy by 2009.
I suspect we’ll start to see solutions sooner that leverage the tools we already have. If we can make more effective use of what we have, and if vendors can make them easy enough to use so that companies currently "abdicating their responsibilities" can get with the program, then we’ll see some progress on preventing data losses.
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