This is my first budget season at this company. When I started, the budget was already set, and my share was pitiful. That's to be expected; there hadn't been a security manager on staff for over a year. But I want to do better this year.
I will have an opportunity to make my pitch to upper management for funding the information security department. This presentation must be concise and easy to understand while explaining my objectives, the current state of affairs and the ramifications of not having funding. Then I will put a dollar figure on each item. I don't expect to get all the money I want, but if my justifications are convincing, I could end up with enough to satisfy my top priorities.
Each item on my wish list will have a justification spelled out on a single slide. But in case I'm asked to expand on those justifications, I will also have supporting metrics derived from infrastructure that we've installed since I came on board.
For example, I want to expand our intrusion-detection system (IDS). Currently, we are able to monitor only about 40 percent of our network, and I want to get as close to 100 percent coverage as possible. In arguing for the money to do that expansion, I can point to the amount of malicious code, hacking activity and acceptable-use policy violations our current coverage already detects. I will explain that malicious code isn't always stopped or even detected by virus protection and that IDS is a great backup in this area. Malicious code has been the source of several Severity 1-type incidents for us over the past several months, sometimes requiring days to clean up after the damage caused by worms on our desktop network. IDS can pick up anomalous behavior, and we can use the signatures to help detect and mitigate this type of activity.
IDS is also useful in detecting attempts by both outsiders and employees to compromise our network, and the metrics we have from the 40 percent of our network that's covered illustrates that such attacks are all too frequent.
Finally, IDS has helped us keep tabs on acceptable-use policy violations, including the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and online games, that consume our network bandwidth, hurt employee productivity and, in the case of file sharing of copyright-protected software and music, have the potential to cause legal problems.
I'll also point out that our IDS infrastructure is a great source of information when we need to troubleshoot problems with the network, applications or servers, since we can filter for certain types of traffic or IP addresses.
Beyond IDS
Similarly, I would like to expand our use of Tripwire Inc.'s change-control offering to all of our roughly 350 critical servers and network infrastructure. Although we have deployed Tripwire to only 15 or so servers, the alerting and reporting provide a wealth of knowledge regarding files that have changed over a period of time. Not only does that data help us with Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance, but it also assists in configuration management and incident response.
And speaking of SarbOx, it continues to absorb a significant amount of time for me and my staff. I will detail the various activities associated with SarbOx compliance in an effort to get approval to add to the department's head count.
I want to invest more in our wireless security infrastructure. To justify the need, I can point to the effectiveness of AirMagnet Inc.'s Handheld Analyzer for tracking down unauthorized access points. With just one of these devices, we have been able to identify eight unauthorized access points at headquarters over the past six months. But this is a global company, and un-authorized access points probably reside in locations ranging from India to Ireland.
Next on my list is expanding our use of SecurID Authentication from RSA Security Inc., along with other configuration management tools, to ensure that our infrastructure remains within standards. We use a variety of vulnerability assessment tools that consistently reveal poorly configured routers, unsecured applications and servers that aren't installed according to policy. These tools provide data that will help me demonstrate certain ongoing weaknesses in our environment.
I don't have space to run through all the items on my wish list, but one of my personal goals for the security department this year is to develop a dashboard that will let us quickly see our current security status based on information that's gathered by many of the tools we already use. Such a dashboard would make it easier to implement changes, show return on investment for our security infrastructure and monitor for trends.
Here are some of the sources of information that would be fed into the dashboard:
Secure Computing Corp.'s SmartFilter, which has been placed on our caching servers to block categories of traffic that are against company policy, such as pornography, gambling, hacking and hate sites.
Secure Computing's SmartReporter, which tells us the number of attempts to visit restricted sites that were blocked.
Trend Micro Inc.'s Control Manager, which provides reports enumerating our resiliency to tens of thousands of viruses per week.
Tripwire, for reports on unauthorized system changes.
I am confident that these data-based justifications will result in the allocation of enough budget to allow us to continue to improve our security posture.
What do you think?
This week's journal is written by a real security manager, "Mathias Thurman," whose name and employer have been disguised for obvious reasons. Contact him at mathias_thurman@yahoo.com, or join the discussions in our security blogs: computerworld.com/blogs/security.
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