Tag: Privacy

2024 ISC2 Global Achievement Award

nielharper

I am pleased to announce that I am the recipient of the 2024 ISC2 Global Achievement Award in the Senior Professional (EMEA) category. The award recognises an individual regionally who has significantly contributed to the enhancement of the cybersecurity workforce by demonstrating a leadership role in their profession.

Cyberspace is only as secure, resilient, and prosperous as its weakest link. This is why I have committed over a decade of my life to developing the next generation of digital trust professionals across the globe. ‘Cyber capacity building’ is a vital need for every nation state in order for citizens to benefit from digitisation while ensuring that critical national infrastructure and digital assets are protected.

This award is testament to my work across the globe addressing the complex risks associated with cyberspace and pervasive digitisation, and ensuring that individuals, communities, corporations, and governments are equipped and empowered to mitigate these risks.

Let me also give a shoutout to Sametria McKinney from The Bahamas who won the same award in the Americas category 🙏🏾 She’s a superstar!!!

The Caribbean is WINNING!!!!!

You can explore the other recipients on the awards landing page.

Cybersecurity Risks and Solutions in Outsourcing

nielharper

“Q: How can generative AI be leveraged to enhance defensive capabilities and support the work of cybersecurity professionals?

A: AI and related features such as machine learning, natural language processing, data mining, predictive analytics, behavioral analytics, and automated decision-making can be used to recognize patterns and learn from past incidents, interpreting human language and democratizing security decision-making across relevant teams, extracting valuable patterns and insights from large datasets, forecasting potential threats based on historical data, monitoring and analyzing user behavior to detect anomalies, and enabling quicker, data-driven responses to identified threats.

Still, AI has become a buzzword recently and is by no means a panacea or replacement for good security practices. Cybersecurity professionals must still develop competencies in delivering the core basics of day-to-day operations—risk assessment, asset management, vulnerability management, security architecture, secure software development, identity and access management, audit logging and monitoring, etc.”

I very much enjoyed this interview with Hugo on third-party risk management (TPRM), especially around clarifying how strong TPRM controls can allow businesses to reap significant benefits from outsourcing key business processes (e.g., cost savings, leveraging specialised talent, productivity, scalability, optimisation of of advanced technologies, strengthening data security, increased global footprint, etc.).

You can view the full interview at this link.

The Lacework Modern CISO Network: Board Book

nielharper

“When boards fail to adequately oversee a growing risk with potentially catastrophic consequences, it’s a serious issue.

Yet, the problem remains — and often goes undetected.

Cybersecurity-related discussions in boardrooms sometimes seem to offer great promise; but in reality, they are unproductive sessions that lead to unfulfilled hopes. On the flip side, sometimes important issues are raised and directors do not sufficiently comprehend the matter under discussion. When board members do have technical knowledge, but are unfamiliar with both cybersecurity at the strategic level and the process of security oversight, boards seem to make other time-sucking errors that can create dangerous failures of oversight.

Finding board members who can successfully blend cybersecurity know-how with business acumen is not an easy task. According to the IANS Research report, just 14% of Russell 3000 CISOs have at least four out of the five ideal board candidate traits.

It is this challenge that this publication seeks to reconcile.”

The Modern CISO Network: Board Book offers boards a directory of experienced experts ready to advise and guide businesses as they navigate the complex world of cybersecurity. By arming companies with a diverse directory of CISOs and other cybersecurity leaders with relevant expertise both in terms of cybersecurity and business acumen, the board book will hopefully make it easier for companies to improve their resilience against modern-day threats.

Transitioning from a techie to a business leader is one the most valuable steps that a CIO or CISO can take, and provides immense value to both the individual in their professional journey and to the organization in terms of addressing pervasive business risks.

I am happy to be featured in the Board Book alongside some of the most outstanding board-ready CISOs in the world. I tip my hat to each and every one of them!

ISACA Board Director Niel Harper Secures a Role on the Professional Standards Working Group of UK Cyber Security Council

nielharper

“The UK Cyber Security Council has announced that Niel Harper, a cybersecurity executive and member of the ISACA Board of Directors, has secured a role in its Professional Standards Working Group. This appointment is an important recognition of Harper’s expertise and contributions to the field of cybersecurity.”

Workforce development is critically important to the security and resilience of nation states (and organizations as a matter of fact). There is diversity in the breadth and depth of cyber security skills required across government. These include deep technical skills and the non-technical cyber security skills that are needed across other specialisms and professions, such as digital, policy, commercial and assurance.

Guided by the standards and pathways established by the UK Cyber Security Council, the UK government will develop its understanding of the range of cyber security skills and knowledge required across government and will respond accordingly, ensuring that its workforce is inclusive and diverse.

I am honoured to have been chosen to join the Professional Standards Working Group of the UK Cyber Security Council. Collaborating with top experts in the field to shape the future of cybersecurity standards in the UK is an exciting opportunity.

No, We Don’t Need Generative AI Meddling in Our CI/CD Pipelines!

nielharper

Infosecurity Magazine recent published an articled titled ‘ChatGPT Leveraged to Enhance Software Supply Chain Security.’

In the article, Neatsun Ziv, CEO and co-founder of OX Security, said that the utilisation of AI tools will provide faster and more accurate data to developers compared to other tools, allowing them to repair security issues far more easily. Harman Singh, managing director and consultant at Cyphere, said that he expects ChatGPT and other generative AI models to make accuracy, speed and quality improvements to the vulnerability management process.

In my opinion, we really don’t need ChatGPT or other generative AI models writing code or integrated into vulnerability management processes. These tools are way too rudimentary and unreliable for such important tasks.

We need to train software developers on secure coding, for example on general standards like Building Security in Maturity Model (BSIMM), OpenSAMM (Software Assurance Maturity Model), and Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and on specific frameworks they use such as Angular, Laravel, Flutter, Ruby on Rails, .NET, and others.

We need strong access controls for repos and pushing updates to repos. We need tooling that creates SBOMs, detects bugs and vulnerabilities in code, and analyses dependencies for vulnerabilities and excessive permissions, among other things. We need effective and repeatable security architecture, patch mgmt and vulnerability mgmt tools and processes. We need software developers who are competent in threat modelling as well as in security by design and privacy design principles.

We DO NOT need generative AI meddling in our CI/CD pipeline and SSDLC (particularly right now)!

Regulating AI Tech is No Longer an Option: It’s a Must!

nielharper

“Responsible, ethical use of AI is the key. From a corporate perspective, business leaders need to articulate why they are planning to use AI and how it will benefit individuals. Companies should develop policies and standards for monitoring algorithms and enhancing data governance and be transparent with the results of AI algorithms. Corporate leadership should establish and define company values and AI guidelines, creating frameworks for determining acceptable uses of AI technologies.

Achieving the delicate balance between innovation and human-centered design is the optimal approach for developing responsible technology and guaranteeing that AI delivers on its promise for this and future generations. Discussions of the risks and harms of artificial intelligence should always be front and center, so leaders can find solutions to deliver the technology with human, social and economic benefits as core underlying principles.”

I recently wrote a short piece on the ISACA Now Blog explaining why a robust framework of laws and regulations are needed for the potential of “AI” to be truly realised.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts!

12 CISO Resolutions for 2022

nielharper

At the beginning of January, my peers and I shared our security and privacy resolutions for 2022 with CSO Online. The full article can be found here on their website.

However, I wanted to further elaborate here on my plans for privacy and security across the enterprise this year.

I have a couple of resolutions for the upcoming year. Firstly, I want to focus more energy and resources on privacy and data. My second resolution is to refine and enhance the control framework around third-party risk management. In third place, but definitely not of lesser importance, is improving my enterprise’s protection against ransomware. The next resolution on my list is continuing to advocate the importance of email security to every business leader I meet; I am specifically referring to Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Finally, I want to gain more control over ‘shadow IT.’

With regards to privacy and data, it’s not only about responding to growing demands from GDPR and other national and regional privacy regulations. It’s just good practice to get a solid handle on where business-critical data assets reside and how this data moves inside and outside of your organization, ensuring that you have adequate and effective controls to prevent data leakage and privacy rights violations (and of course avoid fines). Over 55% of data breaches are now caused by a third-party, so ensuring that I have an efficient, standardized approach for assessing third party risk will most definitely reduce privacy and security exposures from vendors, services providers and even contractors. Ransomware continues to increase in terms of prevalence and severity, so a strong prevention and response strategy is key to operational, financial, and reputation risk reduction. Email security in some form has been around since the early 2000s, and yet less than 35% of companies have implemented DMARC, DKIM and SPF. The value of these technologies in combating brand impersonation, reputation damage, and phishing attacks can’t be emphasized enough. Shadow IT in basic terms means that you’ve lost control and visibility into your IT environment, and if you can’t account for IT assets, you can’t protect them.

My approach to privacy and data governance is premised on user/cultural awareness, end-to-end risk assessment, detailed records of processing activities, effective incident response, strong security controls, and building capabilities to integrate ‘privacy by design’into the CI/CD. I plan to move away from using spreadsheets and manual processes to manage third-party risks, and instead leverage best-of-breed software tools that analyze, track, and minimize risks arising from supply chain exposures. With ransomware, my objective is to incorporate identity and access governance, multi-factor authentication (MFA), advanced honeypots, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and multi-tiered backups (3-2-1 strategy) into a cohesive ransomware prevention strategy. As it pertains to email security, my focus is less about my own shop (we’re already there) and more about assisting my peers and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in properly setting up DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. Preventing shadow IT begins with enhancing usability and eliminating risky workarounds by removing the hindrances that foster them (i.e., being more agile in addressing discrete stakeholder requirements in close collaboration with the IT function).

Pandemic Democracy: COVID-19 And Election Management

nielharper

Elections are large, social gatherings that involve masses of individuals and galvanise entire societies. No other national operation presents a similar degree of operational magnitude, legal and procedural complexity, and broad-based participation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has quickly disrupted elections, creating new pressures and challenges on how they are managed. The key public health threat associated with elections stems from the need for voters to cast their ballots in person, at a polling stations, most often on a single day. Caribbean nations are particularly impacted as they don’t generally support absentee voting, provisional balloting, early voting, or e-voting (in-person or online).

On January 9th, I participated in a Town Hall discussion hosted by the University of the West Indies – Cave Hill Campus.

The panel was predominantly made up of very experienced and highly capable election management professionals, with myself being the sole expert focusing on leveraging technology to guarantee the representativity and legitimacy of the democratic process. My contributions were specifically around the following areas:

  • Guaranteeing access to the voter registration list in a secure and privacy enabling manner
  • Ensuring speed and transparency in counting votes by moving to secure, electronic systems
  • Emergency planning in response to situations like national disasters and pandemics
  • Accommodation for hospitalised voters
  • Staffing electoral commissions with key IT and information security resources
  • The need for government investment in the digitalisation of elections

It was a very stimulating discussion, and I want to express my gratitude to the University of the West Indies for inviting me. Additionally, I want to thank the panelists and the moderators (Professor Cynthia Barrow-Giles and Dr. Dalano DaSouza) for sharing their ideas and insights.

Why the Barbados Election List Data Leak is Problematic – And How it Could Have Been Prevented

nielharper

On 27 December 2021, the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley scheduled a snap election for 19 January 2022.

On 29 December 2021, a full data dump of all eligible voters in the country was published by the Government of Barbados on the open Internet. This occurred largely because the Representation of the People Act 13(1) states “The [Electoral] Commission shall cause to be prepared and shall publish not later than the 31st day of January in every year a register of electors for each constituency and a register of foreign service electors entitled to vote at any election.” 

In the past, this list was made available in somewhat controlled environments to be queried by election officials, candidates, voters, etc. to ensure that elections accurately reflected the will of the people (in most all cases it was usually printed and held at libraries, constituency offices, polling stations, etc. to be reviewed by interested parties). To limit congregation of individuals in the previously mentioned locations during COVID-19 times, it was decided to publish the full voters list on the Internet to ensure access for all.

The 5250-page list contains approximately 250,000 individual records with the below personally identifiable information (PII). *

  • Last Name
  • First Name
  • National Registration Number (similar to a Social Security Number in the United States)
  • Gender
  • Date of Birth
  • Residential Status
  • Constituency (Voting District)
  • Home Address

* The total population of Barbados currently hovers around 290,000 persons.

Instead of this data being restricted to a few thousand persons in Barbados, it was now accessible by all 4.6 billion Internet users, exposing 250,000 Barbadians to increased risks of data misuse and abuse, fraud, identity theft, and other financial and reputation risks. The information was quickly downloaded and posted on Reddit and a number of hacker/fraudster sites on the Dark Web, making it perpetually available to malicious actors. There is also a high physical risk to individuals with regards to stalking, home invasions, robberies, rape, etc.

PII, also referred to as personal data, covers a wide variety of information that can identify a living individual. If a piece of information is unique to that person, it can lead back to them in several ways, and it is private and needs to be protected with the greatest care.

Why Does Personal Data Need to be Kept Safe?

The reason this type of information requires protection is that it can be used to commit fraud or to steal an individual’s identity.

Depending on what a thief is trying to accomplish, he will need different types of information. To open specific accounts all that is needed is an email address, while in other cases an individual’s name, address, date of birth, a national registration number, and other information may be required.

It’s also critical to note that accounts of all types can be opened over the phone or via the internet without having to physically visit a location for your identity to be verified. This provides opportunities for criminals with appropriate stolen information to open bank accounts, enter into contractual agreements, or make claims using someone else’s information or identity.

If a criminal is fraudulently using your information, you might not even know it. They may not use the credit card you already own to make purchases (in which case you might catch them by looking at your purchase history). Most often, criminals open up new, separate accounts using the victim’s information, leaving the victim unaware of the damage that is being done until years after the fact. In that time criminals can rack up a lot of debt using your identity.

How Can Identity Thieves Use Your Personal Data?

There are several ways which identity thieves can use your personal data, including but not limited to the following:

  • Open a new credit card account.
  • Create fake social media accounts with your identity (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.).
  • Take out a commercial bank loan.
  • Obtain and use your debit card to withdraw funds.
  • Change your billing address so your bills will no longer be delivered.
  • Obtain expensive medical care or procedures.
  • Open new utilities accounts in your name (e.g. electricity, water, natural gas, etc.).
  • Obtain a mobile phone service.
  • Open a bank account, obtain a cheque book, and write bad checks.
  • Obtain a new driver’s license or national ID.
  • Use your information when arrested or in a court action.
  • Engage in bullying, stalking, harassment or otherwise cause fear.
  • Inflict severe reputation damage.
  • Combine it with additional data gathered from the Internet (e.g., Google search, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) to create even more detailed profiles of individuals.

How Long Does It Take Fraudsters to Use Stolen Personal Data?

In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States demonstrated how criminals can use your personal information within minutes. The FTC developed fake personal data and posted it on a website that hackers use to make stolen information available. It took a mere nine (9) minutes for the fraudsters to access the information, and over 1,200 attempts were made to access email, credit card and payment accounts. The research confirms how valuable personal information is to identity thieves, and if they can gain access to it, they will most definitely use it.

What Should the Government Have Done Instead?

While it’s not an exhaustive list, below are some of the key steps the government should have taken.

From a technology perspective, a searchable database should have been published on the Government Information Service (GIS) portal, where individuals could use personal data which they already knew to confirm that they were on the voters list. The full database could have been provided to election officials and campaign managers using a digital rights management (DRM) solution to control access and distribution of the document. 

The Data Protection Act was approved by Parliament in July 2019 and came into force in March 2021. This statute introduces a strong privacy and data protection regime in Barbados, and its wide-reaching impact on overall data governance across sectors and industries should have triggered key updates to existing legislation, processes and operational guidelines (including the Representation of the People Act and any other legislation involving personal data processing). And this doesn’t even address the urgent need for broader legislative reforms in the country. There are way too many outdated pieces of legislation which are incompatible with progressive changes in technology, changing community awareness, changing community values, and changing expectations of the legal system.

Appropriate funding should be allocated to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner to better equip them in investigating and monitoring data breaches and providing other types of regulation involving the public sector. Additionally, these financial resources can be used to deliver privacy awareness training to educate government personnel on how to protect individual privacy in their daily work. Simultaneously, a public campaign should be started to achieve broad public awareness on all issues related to the Data Protection Act and the new legal framework created. The Office of the Data Protection Commission is severely under-resourced at present, making it virtually impossible to implement and enforce the Data Protection Act, which focuses largely on preventing exactly these types of data leakages. For example, adhering to the principle of data minimisation would have significantly reduced the risk and impact of publishing the entire voters list. By this I mean the narrowing of data collection and processing to strictly what is needed – In this case, there is absolutely no reason to publicly release the National Registration Number (NRN) and Date of Birth of all eligible voters.

Why the Electoral and Boundaries Commission (EBC) is Dead Wrong

The Electoral and Boundaries Commission (EBC) has strongly (and wrongly might I add) defended its decision to publish the voters list online. Their position is that “We are obligated to publish the list now electronically so that more people can have access to it.” Chairman of the EBC Queen’s Counsel Leslie Haynes also maintains that “ID numbers are not private” and made reference to them “being published before the introduction of the digital age in public libraries, rum shops, the electoral office and other spaces.” Because a law states that you must publish information electronically doesn’t mean you should make it accessible to 4.6 billion Internet users (including hackers, fraudsters and other cyber criminals). There are numerous laws in Barbados that are outdated, poorly drafted, contradictory to other laws, and incompatible with existing technology – Should we follow them all to the letter or do we comprehensively update them to be more fit for purpose? Moreover, there are numerous technology solutions available for publishing said data online in a controlled manner to reduce the overall risk and exposure. And if they are not at fault, why did government officials remove the voters list from the public websites?

Finally, national registration number (NRN), date of birth (DOB) and home address are all private information, and there are established technical standards, privacy principles, and national laws or treaties around the globe that assert as much. From a data minimisation perspective, the requirements of the law could have been satisfied without including NRN and DOB.

Where online can you find the social security numbers (SSNs) for all eligible voting Americans? What about the passport numbers or driver’s license numbers for all voting Canadians? What about the national ID numbers for all voters in France, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, etc.? The answer is NOWHERE!

[UPDATE] Sunday, 2 January 2022 – I have amended the original blog post in response to the EBC’s staunch defence of their decision to publish the voters list on the open Internet.

Five Cybersecurity Takeaways from the ARIN 48 Keynote and Panel

nielharper

“During the Q&A, Harper also pointed out that the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has adopted a cybersecurity certification framework where certain Internet of Things (IoT) devices must be validated from a privacy and security perspective, and said the US is working on a similar initiative.”

Insecure IoT devices continue to be major contributors to Internet (in)security, particularly with regards to increasing attack vectors for enterprises, distributed denial of service (DDoS), critical infrastructure (CI) resilience, and personal data protection, among other risk areas.

ENISA is doing some great work with their Guidelines for Securing the IoT Supply Chain, Cybersecurity Certification Framework, Risk Assessment Tool for IoT, and the Good Practice for Connected Cars.

Still, there’s a lot more to be done through increased stakeholder collaboration. I definitely have time for these types of initiatives!