Is It Pumpkin Spice Season Already?
Welcome to the latest edition of the Numberline Security newsletter! Whether you’re ready or not, it’s Autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere, which means that it’s Pumpkin Spice season. In this spirit we’re sharing a recipe for home-made pumpkin spice latte.
We were going to make a joke about pumpkin spice pizza, but as it turns out we found a delicious-looking recipe from none other than the amazing Food Lab chef, J. Kenji López-Alt. We cooked this over the weekend, and it was delish!
Autumn also brings us Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Cybersecurity Awareness Month is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Use this as an opportunity to educate your friends and relatives on the need for password managers, and to exercise a heightened vigilance for deepfakes and scams. Computers and communication technology have provided tremendous benefits, but also increased our risks. Be careful out there.
News
IBM just released their annual Cost of a Data Breach report, so I created a brief video to talk through a few of the report's statistics, as well as several takeaways and a couple minor disappointments.
Car dealership technology provider CDK remained offline 5 days after being hit with a ransomware attack. How would a ?Zero Trust approach have helped? This blog explores how Zero Trust can enhance business resilience.
Here is my take on Fortinet's acquisition of NextDLP -- what does it mean for customers, what should they expect, and what should they look out for?
The View from Point Zero
A personal reminder of the need for validation and review of backup plans
Over the summer, my wife and I took a vacation in Maine, with no kids or dogs. It was an excellent, relaxing time filled with lobsters, hiking, and vigorous bike rides. If you haven’t been to Acadia National Park, I highly recommend it. Our National Park System is such a great asset, and Acadia is a gem.
Acadia is on Mount Desert Island, well up the coast of Maine near the Canadian border – which means it’s about a five-hour drive from our home in metro Boston. On the morning of our final day of vacation, we received a phone call from our daughter, who was staying at home with the dog.
“Help, I’m locked out of the house!”
OK, no problem. We prepared for this situation when we first moved into the house!
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“I’m sorry to hear that! Just use the hidden front door key - remember, it’s under the loose stone by the spigot”
“Yes, I looked and it’s not there”.
“Hmmm, ok, what about the one in the garage? Remember, it’s on the shelf by the door?”
“No, that’s not there either.”
“Oh. Are you sure?”
“Yes, I double checked!”
As you can imagine, this turned into a stressful morning, and an expensive emergency visit from the locksmith.
When we returned home, we had an after-action review to determine the root cause of the incident. While our access recovery plans were properly created and resourced upon initial move-in, it turns out they hadn’t been validated in at least 10 years. Where did the extra keys go? This is an unsolved mystery, but it’s likely they were moved at some point during various maintenance or gardening projects, and never replaced.
What can we learn from this?
It’s not enough to have a backup plan - it needs to be regularly validated and reviewed. If we had done this before we left town, our daughter would have been in the house in no time.
Shifting to our IT and information security domain, this is a reminder to regularly validate and exercise our business continuity / disaster recovery plans. Plans must include basic validation of access to the documented processes by multiple people - there shouldn’t be any steps or processes that rely on a single person (who will inevitably be unavailable when an incident actually occurs). And, it must also include actual tests of the continuity or recovery processes, matching the set of scenarios for which you’ve prepared. For example - a single hardware-based server in your data center fails, and needs to be restored in place. Or, the entire data center floods, and needs to be restored into a dissimilar environment offsite.
Remember, the only reason you’re investing time and money in a backup and recovery system is so that you can successfully perform recoveries. If you’re only executing the backup portion, and don’t have documented, validated, and robust recovery processes, you aren't doing a proper job at this. When an incident occurs, you need to be confident in your organization’s ability to recover. They’re relying on you, so be ready.
Interested in joining a peer Zero Trust Practitioner community?
We’ve just launched The Neighborhood, a Zero Trust peer community, where practitioners share and learn through interactive, bi-weekly guided discussions. Learn more and register here!
Let us help you
How ready are you? Find out the easy way by joining us for a free, 30-minute session to ensure your Zero Trust strategy is set up for success. For more information visit us here! ?