Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools

Enterprise Security A practitioners guide. Chapter 1. Security A working definition. Security is defined in various ways, depending on perspective. Business managers might see it as a collection of pesky, cost increasing regulatory mandates. Information technology IT professionals might see it as competition with the bad guys the player who wins owns the network. Security defined in these and other limited ways is not really what security professionals should support every day. Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' title='Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' />What we need is a working definition of security that shows how it adds value to an organization. For example, protecting customer privacy enhances customer retention and limits customer driven litigation. Another example is maintaining the availability and accuracy of information necessary for business operation. Yet another is the protection of competitive advantage by safeguarding intellectual property. These examples all have one thing in common managing risk. Information security is information risk management. It requires the same disciplines as other business risk mitigation activities. The main difference is in the threatvulnerability pairs addressed. For our purposes See Figure 1. Security ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets through the reasonable and appropriate application of administrative, technical, and physical controls, as required by risk management. Figure 1 Information Security. In the following pages, we look at why risk management is necessary and the various controls used to mitigate business exposure to threats. Keep in mind that no specific control is implemented in exactly the same way in every business. The concept of reasonable and appropriate should always prevail. Managing Risk. Before we can build our defenses, we have to know what we are protecting against how exposed we are. This is often a difficult concept to understand. After all, we are informed every day about vulnerabilities in applications and operating systems that might cause the collapse of civilization as we know it. However, vulnerabilities do not always unacceptably elevate an organizations risk. Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' title='Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' />The formula in Figure 2 is a common representation of how to calculate risk. The values of probability of occurrence and business impact are directly related to risk value. For example, if business impact goes up, risk goes up. The value of controls is inversely related to risk. The better the controls, the lower the risk. Our goal is to reduce risk to a level acceptable to management, not necessarily to zero. Figure 2 Risk Formula. Probability of Occurrence. Probability of occurrence PO is the product of one manageable value and one nearly unmanageable value vulnerabilities and threats. Sarbanes-Oxley-Act.jpg' alt='Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' title='Sarbanes Oxley It Compliance Using Cobit And Open Source Tools' />Corporate Compliance Seminars CCS is your source for continuing professional education CPE credit concerning internal audit, COSO, internal controls and financial. MetricStream provides enterprise wide Governance, Risk and Compliance GRC and quality management solutions overview for global corporations. Manual processes must be automated to cut cost of SarbanesOxley audits, says Basda. Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in a system, network, or process. A more business focused definition would be weaknesses in people, processes, or technology. Threats are technical, human, or natural eventseither accidental or intentionalthat exploit vulnerabilities. The probability that a threat will exploit a vulnerability depends on the existence of the threat, the accessibility of a required vulnerability, and the effectiveness of preventive controls. Vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are manageable because we control where and when they occur or at least we try. For example, Microsoft releases patches on the first Tuesday of every month. Most of the patches eliminate vulnerabilities. If we apply the patches, we deny existing or emerging threats a means of attacking Windows. We also eliminate multiple vulnerabilities when we use locks to deny unauthorized data center access. In this excerpt from Chapter 2 of SarbanesOxley IT Compliance Using COBIT and Open Source Tools, authors Christian Lahti, Roderick Peterson, Steve Lanza, introduce. IT Business Edge bloggers keep you uptodate on the current technology headlines and give you the insight needed to cut through the marketing buzz to the real. Connect to download. Get pdf. Instructor Solution Manual for Accounting Information Systems, 12E. Eliminating vulnerabilities is limited only by vendor diligence, our ability to detect weaknesses, and our organizations willingness to include vulnerability remediation in the annual budget. Threats. Vulnerabilities do not elevate risk in the absence of related threats. However, there is almost always a threat ready to take advantage of a network, system, application, or human weakness. According to NIST 2. Any circumstance or event with the potential to adversely impact organizational operations including mission, functions, image, or reputation, organizational assets, or individuals through an information system via unauthorized access, destruction, disclosure, modification of information, andor denial of service. Also, the potential for a threat agent to successfully exploit a particular information system vulnerability p. Simply, a threat is something with motive and means that, with a reasonable degree of probability, will exploit one of your vulnerabilities. The means used by a threat is known as a threat agent. A threat agent is either, 1 intent and method targeted at the exploitation of a vulnerability or 2 a situation and method that might accidentally trigger a vulnerability Stoneburner, Goguen, Feringa, 2. For example, a worm and a keystroke logger are threat agents. One very important objective of security is to hinder or prevent threat agent access to the target vulnerability. Advanced persistent threats, however, keep trying, and trying, and trying, and. Advanced Persistent Threats. There is much talk about advanced persistent threats APT, and most of it is wrong. Many victim organizations like to tag successful breaches with APT as the cause because it creaes the appearance of helplessness instead of negligence. However, an APT is a very specific type of threat. An APT is a human or an organization conducting a campaign against a target, with malicious or criminal intent, characterized by the determination of the threat and the resources it is willing to expend to achieve the objective GTISC GTRI, 2. In most cases, the attack continues until the cost exceeds the benefits of success. A Trojan inadvertently invited onto your network is not necessarilyand usually is notan APT. Business Impact. Business impact is the aggregate negative effect of a security incidenta vulnerability exploited by a threat agenton an organization. Impact is usually measured as short or long term financial loss. Controls. Controls help prevent, detect, or respond to threat agent attempts to exploit our vulnerabilities. They fall into three categories administrative, technical, and physical. Administrative Controls. Administrative controls include policies, standards and guidelines, and procedures. Security policies clearly state management intent. For example, an acceptable use policy might state that employees may not remove data from the company network. Note that the policy does not say how this will happen it simply says that management does not want it to happen. It states a security what, but not a how. Standards and guidelines enforce policy by documenting how IT and other business groups will meet policy intent. Employees must comply with standards and do their best to comply with guidelines. In our data removal example, standards might include. Andrea Bocelli Vivo Por Ella Descargar more. No USB ports on desktop computers will be enabled for data transfer unless approved by security and required for business operation. All files destined for recipients outside the company network must be sent via secure FTP or other secure connection managed by IT. These standards might be mandated by senior management or by relevant regulation. For example, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act HIPAA contains many standards dictating what the Department of Health and Human Services HHS deems necessary to protect electronic health information e.