Certification Suckers

In my moderately cynical view, vendor certification exists for one reason: To enable vendors to sell more stuff. Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon and VMWare (and all vendors, really) need people to be certified in the use of their products because it enables their salespeople to be able to come into a prospective customer’s office and say,…

Top Ten—Data Breaches that Made the News

By Annette Leonard Many information security incidents are newsworthy, especially when they involve compromise of personal, financial and/or medical information. Here is our “Top Ten” list of data breaches that have made the news over the past few years. While some of these compromises may have resulted from very sophisticated attack methods, others were traceable to basic lapses in good security practices—the very things the…

Common Controls and Inheritance

By Kathryn M. Farrish, CISSP Common Controls are security controls whose implementation results in a security capability that is inheritable  by multiple information systems (IS). For example, the information systems hosted in a data center will typically inherit numerous security controls from the hosting provider, such as: Physical and environmental security controls Network boundary defense security controls Other inheritance scenarios include agency or departmental-level policies…