Worst Practices??

New research reveals an epidemic of security worst practices, with a majority of organizations failing to adhere to simple data protection standards. In many cases, it also revealed that many organizations are critically unaware of what security practices are currently in place.

The 2011 IT Security Best Practices Assessment was developed by Echelon One, an IT security research firm specializing in security programs and guidance, and Venafi, developer of Enterprise Key and Certificate Management (EKCM) solutions. Echelon One led the effort to establish a set of 12 best practices and worked closely with Venafi to evaluate how well 420 enterprises and government agencies implemented them.

“The assessment findings were startling. We suspected we would find that many organizations were challenged, but we had no idea that failure rates would run this high,” said Bob West, founder and CEO of Echelon One. “The good news is that with this information and free self-assessment, organizations can see where they rank in comparison to peers, and determine where weaknesses exist. They can identify steps to significantly reduce security and compliance risks by leveraging automated processes with multilayered data security strategies, including managed encryption.”

The assessment evaluated where organizations rank in the implementation of 12 IT security and compliance best practices, ranging from how organizations leverage and manage encryption to how often they conduct security awareness and training programs. The top five best practices, their high failure rates and recommendations for mitigation include:

Best Practice 1: Perform quarterly security and compliance training.  Failure rate = 77 percent

Recommendation: Deploy technologies that compensate for lack of training resources by removing opportunities for human error through automation.

Best Practice 2: Encrypt all cloud data and cloud transactions.
Failure rate =  64 percent

Recommendation: Salesforce.com, Google Apps and other cloud applications do not encrypt by default. Deploy third-party technologies that encrypt cloud data — both in motion and at rest — to enhance security, compliance and privacy.

Best Practice 3: Use encryption throughout the organization.
Failure rate = 10 percent

Recommendation: Although the low failure rate seems encouraging, failure to implement management technologies can turn encryption into a liability by exposing keys and certificates that provide unrestricted access to seemingly secure data. Deploy technologies that can manage encryption assets across the entire enterprise.

Best Practice 4: Have management processes in place to ensure business continuity in the event of a certificate authority (CA) compromise.  Failure rate =  55 percent

Recommendation: Digital certificates rank among the most ubiquitous security technologies. However, as recent CA breaches demonstrate, certificate authorities have been and will continue to be compromised. Using a CA is only half the battle — to further reduce risk, have a plan for immediately replacing all certificates and encryption keys generated by the compromised CA.

Best Practice 5: Rotate SSH keys every 12 months to mitigate the risk incurred by average two-year employee turnover rates of service.  Failure rate — 82 percent

Recommendation: SSH keys provide servers and their administrators with root-level access to critical systems and data. A key-rotation period that far exceeds the average employee's lifecycle significantly increases the risk that a former employee or malicious admin can gain unfettered and unauthorized access. Enterprises that do not rotate keys fail to understand their significance and related security vulnerabilities. Deploy technologies that simplify and automate key rotation.

The assessment further revealed that almost 100 percent of evaluated organizations had some degree of security, compliance or operational risk.

• When asked if their organizations encrypted data stored in leading public clouds such as Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox, 40 percent said they did not know.
• When asked how often critical encryption assets such as SSH keys were rotated, 41 percent responded that they did not know.
• When asked if their organizations were using encryption keys and certificates for data security and system authentication, 10 percent said they were not.

“The biggest security struggle organizations face today is managing the unknown — a.k.a. the unquantified and unmanaged risks. Your best security assets can easily turn into liabilities if not managed properly,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “If this assessment demonstrates anything, it’s that IT and security departments have got to gain greater visibility over all of their security and compliance activities, and take steps to better understand and manage them.”

The Venafi 2011 IT Security Best Practices Assessment evaluated 420 participant organizations through an independent online survey conducted in July. Sixty percent of the evaluated organizations employ large workforces of 5,000 or more employees. Respondent organizations came from multiple industries, including banking and financial services (27 percent), high tech (14 percent), government (11 percent), and manufacturing (8 percent).

When you're ready to quantify and manage such risk, call Milestone Systems, authorized value-added integrator of Venafi.