For years now, Information security is a fast growing market. At least for a couple of years, the cyber security market is growing fast. Even in these times of budget cut in many sectors, quite often the cyber security department manages to negotiate an increase of its operational budget. That’s significant, isn’t it? Moreover, nowadays it becomes nearly impossible to ignore the wave of “cyber-“ words: cybercrime, cyberterrorism, cybersex or cyberbullying.
You could not have missed also the news about the CERT.be, the federal cyber emergency team (CERT used to be the Computer Emergency response team, likely less “sexy” than Cyber emergency Team) which is, according to its website, “a neutral specialist in Internet and network security” (So Cyber security is Internet and Network Security?). With the CERT.BE, you probably also read about the Belgian Center for Cyber-security (CCB). Neither could you haven’t noticed the buzz around the new Belgian Cyber Security Coallition or the 1.8 billion € allocated by the European Commission to a private-public partnership made to increase Cyber Security. In the latter, the private sector is being represented by the newly born European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO). That’s a lot of Cyber-related news, isn’t it? Does Azimov’s vision become a reality? It sure sounds like we are in one of his Robots series book.
But what does Cyber mean? How is Cyber Security different from Information security or IT security? Which one of both is it?
According to the NIST, Cybersecurity is “The process of protecting information by preventing, detecting, and responding to attacks”. So, is it Information Security? But according to the new worldwide reference, Wikipedia, Cyber is “part of the “Internet-related prefixes added to a wide range of existing words to describe new, Internet- or computer-related flavors of existing concepts, often electronic products and services that already have a non-electronic counterpart”. So, Cyber Security should be the Internet or Computer related flavor of information security that we used to call IT security. But is it?
Because lately I’ve heard the “cyber-buzzwords” used in so many different contexts by so many person (including some executive clearly not knowing what they were talking about), I have difficulties to understand what we are talking about exactly.
Understand me well, I like the fact that our country’s leaders finally decided to address the increase of the Internet related threats more seriously. As our risk surface is drastically expanding, it is more than time to address those risks at a more global level (but we are still far from a clearly necessary worldwide cybersecurity agency, for a lot of obvious political reasons). I also like the fact that my clients’ board of directors give more focus to “cybersecurity”, whatever they think it is. At last, it provides us a momentum to raise awareness and improve the governance maturity to the necessary level.
What I don’t like in the “Cyber” fashion, is having a so important subject becoming more and more vague and focused, again, on the technological aspects. With the new buzzword came a lot of new supposed-to-be-panacea products claiming they will solve all the problems overnight (or in a few months, but at our timescale, it is the same). I heard of CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) being rebranded CCSO (Chief Cyber Security Officer).
Is it really a progress? For years we fought to have the CISO positions created at a board level in order to get out of the IT ghetto. The aim was to be also present where information security belongs: in the organizations processes and workforce. In 2016, the latest IBM security survey still attributes 60% of attacks to inside jobs. 1 employee out of 5 is ready to sell his corporate’s network credentials. The biggest weaknesses are still in the business processes and in the human being behind them. Most ethical hackers and red team members know that they don’t need a zero-day exploit to get into a target’s systems, they just need a charming smile and a couple of beer to get what they need to get in. With all the good this new Cyber buzzword brings, there is an evil: we are going back to a computer and technologically focused perception of corporate security issues. Human, processes and facilities are relegated to the second position while they still represent more than 70% of the risks. Does it make sense? Is Cyber Security an evil buzzword after all?
Few will share this article as a lot of cyber security professionnal won’t dare to challenge the marketing machine that is actually feeding them. And as I wrote, there was some good coming out of this, but it is necessary to see all the side impacts and ensure marketing people are not the one deciding where you should put your focus.