Posts relating to responding to security incidents, CERTs, CSIRTs and similar acronyms
Apparently Miranda Mowbray had been wanting to do a talk on “Things that Go Bump in the Night” for some time, and it made an excellent closing keynote for the 2019 FIRST conference in Edinburgh (recording now available on YouTube). Although “things” may increasingly need an Internet connection to operate, there are significant differences between […]
An interesting talk from Rockwell at this year’s FIRST conference looked at how to organise incident response in environments containing network-connected hardware devices. Though Rockwell’s focus is on industrial machinery, the same ideas should apply to smart buildings and other places where a security incident can cause physical, not just digital, harm. This is not […]
In data protection circles, the phrase “Safe Harbour” doesn’t have a great reputation. Wikipedia describes those as setting hard boundaries around an area where “a vaguer, overall standard” applies. Famously, in 2015, the European Court of Justice struck down the data protection Safe Harbor arrangement negotiated between the European Commission and the US Government. So […]
Incident response teams often share information when investigating incidents. Some patterns may only become apparent when data from different networks are compared; other teams may have skills – such as analysing malware – to understand data in ways we cannot. Since much of this information includes IP or email addresses – information classed as Personal […]
With the GDPR having now been in force for more than six months, my talk at this week’s EUNIS workshop looked at some of the less familiar corners of the GDPR map. In particular, since EUNIS provided an international audience, I was looking for opportunities to find common, or at least compatible, approaches across the […]
The Government’s powers make orders relating to information about communications have now moved from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The associated Code of Practice provides useful information on the process for issuing three types of notice in particular: Communications Data Requests, Technical Capabilities Orders and Data Retention […]
I’ve been asked a number of times whether GDPR affects the sharing of information between incident response teams. This slideset from a recent RUGIT Security meeting discusses how GDPR encourages sharing to improve security, and provides a rule of thumb for deciding when the benefit of sharing justifies the data protection risk. Information Sharing and […]
At last week’s Jisc Security Conference I presented a talk on how we’ve assessed a couple of Jisc services (our Security Operations Centre and Penetration Testing Service) from a data protection perspective. The results have reassured us that these services create benefits rather than risks for Jisc, its customers and members, and users of the […]
Some good news from the draft ePrivacy Regulation. More than a year after I pointed out that the Regulation could inadvertently prohibit websites and other Internet-connected services from using logfiles to secure their services, the Council of Ministers’ latest (20th September 2018) draft explicitly recognises the problem. Recital 8 now includes the positive statement that: […]
Over recent months the GDPR has given extra weight to concerns – originally expressed by regulators fifteen years ago – about public access to information about individual registrants of DNS domains. This article considers the use of this WHOIS data by those handling information security incidents, and why this represents a benefit, rather than a […]