OK, so there’s this article being bounced all over the place.  Basic synopsis is that FISMA is keeping the government from doing any kind of electronic health records stuff because FISMA requirements extend to health care providers and researchers when they take data from the Government.

Read one version of the story here

So the whole solution is that, well, we can’t extend FISMA to eHealthcare when the data is owned by the Government because that security management stuff gets in the way.  And this post is about why they’re wrong and right, but not in the places that they think they are.

Government agencies need to protect the data that they have by providing “adequate security”.  I’ve covered this a bazillion places already. Somewhere somehow along the lines we let the definition of adequate security mean “You have to play by our rulebook” which is complete and utter bunk.  The framework is an expedient and a level-setting experience across the government.  It’s not made to be one-size-fits-all, but is instead meant to be tailored to each individual case.

The Government Information Security Trickle-Down Effect is a name I use for FISMA/NIST Framework requirements being transferred from the Government to service providers, whether they’re in healthcare or IT or making screws that sometimes can be used on the B2 bombers.  It will hit you if you take Government data but only because you have no regulatory framework of your own with which you can demonstrate that you have “adequate security”.  In other words, if you provide a demonstrable level of data protection equal to or superior to what the Government provides, then you should reasonably be able to take the Government data, it’s finding the right “esperanto” to demonstrate your security foo.

If only there was a regulatory scheme already in place that we could use to hold the healthcare industry to.  Oh wait, there is: HIPAA.  Granted, HIPAA doesn’t really have a lot of teeth and its effects are maybe demonstrable, but it does fill most of the legal requirement to provide “adequate security”, and that’s what’s the important thing, and more importantly, what is required by FISMA.

And this is my problem with this whole string of articles:  The power vacuum has claimed eHealthcare.  Seriously, there should be somebody who is in charge of the data who can make a decision on what kinds of protections that they want for it.  In this case, there are plenty of people with different ideas on what that level of protection is so they are asking OMB for an official ruling.  If you go to OMB asking for their guidance on applying FISMA to eHealthcare records, you get what you deserve, which is a “Yes, it’s in scope, how do you think you should do this?”

So what the eHealthcare people really are looking for is a set of firm requirements from their handlers (aka OMB) on how to hold service providers accountable for the data that they are giving them.  This isn’t a binary question on whether FISMA applies to eHealthcare data (yes, it does), it’s a question of “how much is enough?” or even “what level of compensating controls do we need?”

But then again, we’re beaten down by compliance at this point.  I know I feel it from time to time.  After you’ve been beaten badly for years, all you want to do is for the batterer to tell you what you need to do so the hurting will stop.

So for the eHealthcare agencies, here is a solution for you.  In your agreements/contracts to provide data to the healthcare providers, require the following:

• Provider shall produde annual statements for HIPAA compliance
• Provider shall be certified under a security management program such as an  ISO 27001, SAS-70 Type II, or even PCI-DSS
• Provider shall report any incident resulting in a potential data breach of 500 or more records within 24 hours
• Financial penalties for data breaches based on number of records
• Provider shall allow the Government to perform risk assessments of their data protection controls

That should be enough compensating controls to provide “adequate security” for your eHealthcare data.  You can even put a line through some of these that are too draconian or high-cost.  Take that to OMB and tell them how you’re doing it and how they would like to spend the taxpayers’ money to do anything other than this.

Case Files and Medical Records photo by benuski.

• When the Feds Come Calling
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise
• New SP 800-60 is Out, Categorize Yerselves Mo Better
• GAO’s 5 Steps to “Fix” FISMA
• More on Georgia’s FISMA Reporting

So let me give you a hypothetical job:

• You have to give up your high-paying private-sector job to be a Government employee
• You have tons of responsibility
• You have no real authority
• You have no dedicated budget
• You have no staffers
• The job has had half a dozen people filling it in the last 7 years
• The job has been open longer than it’s been staffed over the past 7 years

And yet this is what we’re asking candidates to do in order to even be a candidate for the Cybersecurity Coordinator.  Yes, this is the exact same problem that all CISOs have with having a huge helping of responsibility and none of the authority to get things done, only we scaled it up and out to a national-level CISO position.

Somebody’s even gone as far to say that the lack of candidates for the job is the security field’s way of sending the message that you didn’t scope the job right.  I think this opinion has much merit.  CISOs being what they are, they’re usually pretty astute at walking into an ambush, and this job has all the makings of a good one.

I’ll even turn it around the other way and say that the security industry has yet to produce a CISO’s CISO–somebody who can do politics, budget, security, IT, and consensus-building all in one person.  We have lots of people who can manage the enterprise and below, but it’s that additional little bit of political intrigue that is what we’re missing.  Security people usually avoid politics like the bubonic plague because we’re an industry full of people who say it like it really is.  This is a detriment in sales and politics.

So in true Guerilla-CISO fashion of not pointing out problems without offering something as a fix (no matter how much of a strawman arguement it really is), this is what we need to do to get people interested in being the Cybersecurity Czar^wCoordinator:

• A really well-defined scope.  One person cannot do everything that we are asking for at this price (or any price for that matter).
• A budget for an operating staff where the number is more than than 8 digits.
• Statutory authority over the various departments and agencies responsible for cybersecurity: NCSD, S&T, DoJ, FBI, Commerce.  Indirect influence doesn’t work here, never has.
• The direct ear of the President.  Councils are OK, but puhlease, you want to get the job done, this is what it will take.

Then I read back through my list and realized that we really do need a law to create the Cybersecurity Czar position with everything that I just mentioned.  But here’s the rub: legislation is slow, the bills to make the Cybersecurity Czar aren’t even going to be looked at until the next congressional session because we’re still trying to figure out the budget for last year.

I also think that what we’re calling the Cybersecurity Czar is really 2 jobs.  You need somebody working for the Government CIO Vivek Kundra as the executive-branch CISO and you need a more senior person who worries about the military-industrial base, the critical infrastructure, the support to American commerce, and the protection of little old grandmas who represent the end-users.

Tsar’s Cannon photo by Siyad Ma.  Now that’s some teeth for the position.

• Blow-By-Blow on S.773–The Cybersecurity Act of 2009–Part 5
• Blow-By-Blow on S.773–The Cybersecurity Act of 2009–Part 4
• Next Up in Security Legislation: S3474
• Cyber Security coming to a boil
• A Layered Model for Massively-Scaled Security Management

Letter from GAO on how Congress can fix FISMA.  And oh yeah, the press coverage on it.

Now supposedly this was in response to an inquiry from Congress about “Please comment on the need for improved cyber security relating to S.773, the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009.”  This is S.773.

GAO is mixing issues and has missed the mark on what Congress asked for.  S.773 is all about protecting critical infrastructure.  It only rarely mentions government internal IT issues.  S.773 has nothing at all to do with FISMA reform.  However, GAO doesn’t have much expertise in cybersecurity outside of the Federal Agencies (they have some, but I would never call it extensive), so they reported on what they know.

The GAO report used the often-cited metric of an increase in cybersecurity attacks against Government IT systems growing from “5,503 incidents reported in fiscal year 2006 to 16,843 incidents in fiscal year 2008” as proof that the agencies are not doing anything to fix the problem.  I’ve questioned these figures before, it’s associated with the measurement problem and increased reporting requirements more than an increase in attacks.  Truth be told, nobody knows if the attacks are increasing and, if so, at what rate.  I would guess they’re increasing, but we don’t know, so quit citing some “whacked” metric as proof.

Reform photo by shevy.

GAO’s recommendations for FISMA Reform:

Clarify requirements for testing and evaluating security controls.  In other words, the auditing shall continue until the scores improve.  Hate to tell you this, but really all you can test at the national level is if the FISMA framework is in place, the execution of the framework (and by extension, if an agency is secure or not) is largely untestable using any kind of a framework.

Require agency heads to provide an assurance statement on the overall adequacy and effectiveness of the agency’s information security program.  This is harkening back to the accounting roots of GAO.  Basically what we’re talking here is for the agency head to attest that his agency has made the best effort that it can to protect their IT.  I like part of this because part of what’s missing is “executive support” for IT security.  To be honest, though, most agency heads aren’t IT security dweebs, they would be signing an assurance statement based upon what their CIO/CISO put in the executive summary.

Enhance independent annual evaluations.  This has significant cost implications.  Besides, we’re getting more and more evaluations as time goes on with an increase in audit burden.  IE, in the Government IT security space, how much of your time is spent providing proof to auditors versus building security?  For some people, it’s their full-time job.

Strengthen annual reporting mechanisms.  More reporting.  I don’t think it needs to get strengthened, I think it needs to get “fixed”.  And by “fixed” I mean real metrics.  I’ve touched on this at least a hundred times, go check out some of it….

Strengthen OMB oversight of agency information security programs.  This one gives me brain-hurt.  OMB has exactly the amount of oversight that they need to do their job.  Just like more auditing, if you increase the oversight and the people doing the execution have the same amount of people and the same amount of funding and the same types of skills, do you really expect them to perform differently?

Rybolov’s synopsis:

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and I think that’s what GAO is doing here.  Since performance in IT security is obviously down, they suggest that more auditing and oversight will help.  But then again, at what point does the audit burden tip to the point where nobody is really doing any work at all except for answering to audit requests?

Going back to what Congress really asked for, We run up against a problem.  There isn’t a huge set of information about how the rest of the nation is doing with cybersecurity.  There’s the Verizon DBIR, the Data Loss DB, some surveys, and that’s about it.

So really, when you ask GAO to find out what the national cybersecurity situation is, all you’re going to get is a bunch of information about how government IT systems line up and maybe some anecdotes about critical infrastructure.

Coming to a blog near you (hopefully soon): Rybolov’s 5 steps to “fix” FISMA.

• A Funny Thing Happened Last Week on Capital Hill
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise
• FISMA Report Cards Issued–Response is Rote by Now
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”
• No, FISMA Doesn’t Require That, Silly Product Pushers

Rybolov’s Note: Hello all, I’m venturing into an open-ended series of blog posts aimed at starting conversation. Note that I’m not selling anything *yet* but ideas and maybe some points for discussion.

Let’s get this out there from the very beginning: I agree with Ranum that full-scale, nation-v/s-nation Cyberwar is not a reality.  Not yet anyway, and hopefully it never will be.  However, on a smaller scale with well-defined objectives, cyberwar is not only happening now, but it is also a natural progression over the past century.

Looking at where we’re coming from in the existing models and techniques for activities similar to cyberwar, it frames our present state very nicely :

Electronic Countermeasures. This has been happening for some time.  The first recorded use of electronic countermeasures (ECM) was in 1905 when the Russians tried to jam radio signals of the Japananese fleet besieging Port Arthur.  If you think about ECM as DOS based on radio, sonar, etc, then it seems like cyberwar is just an extension of the same denial of communications that we’ve been doing since communication was “invented”.

Modern Tactical Collection and Jamming. This is where Ranum’s point about spies and soldiers falls apart, mostly because we don’t have clandestine operators doing electronic collection at the tactical level–they’re doing both collection and “attack”.  The typical battle flow goes something along the lines of scanning for items of interest, collecting on a specific target, then jamming once hostilities have begun.  Doctrinally, collection is called Electronic Support and jamming is called Electronic Attack.  What you can expect in a cyberwar is a period of reconnaissance and surveillance for an extended length of time followed by “direct action” during other “kinetic” hostilities.

Radio Station Jamming. This is a wonderful little world that most of you never knew existed.  The Warsaw Pact used to jam Radio America and other sorts of fun propaganda that we would send at them.  Apparently we’ve had some interesting radio jamming since the end of the Cold War, with China, Cuba, North Korea, and South Korea implicated in some degree or another.

Website Denial-of-Service. Since only old people listen to radio anymore and most news is on the Internet, so it makes sense to DOS news sites with an opposing viewpoint.  This happens all the time, with attacks ranging from script kiddies doing ping floods to massive DOSBots and some kind of racketeering action… “You got a nice website, it would be pretty bad if nobody could see it.”  Makes me wonder why the US hasn’t taken Al Jazeera off the Internet.  Oh, that’s right, somebody already tried it.  However, in my mind, jamming something like Al Jazeera is very comparable to jamming Voice of America.

Estonia and Gruzija DOS. These worked pretty well from a denial-of-communications standpoint, but only because of the size of the target.  And so what if it did block the Internet, when it comes to military forces, it’s at best an annoyance, at most it will slow you down just enough.  Going back to radio jamming, blocking out a signal only works when you have more network to throw at the target than the target has network to communicate with the other end.  Believe it or not, there are calculators to determine this.

Given this evolution of communications denial, it’s not unthinkable that people wouldn’t be launching electronic attacks at each other via radar, radio, carrier pigeon, IP or any other way they can.

However, as in the previous precedents and more to some of the points of Ranum’s talk at DojoSec, electronic attacks by themselves only achieve limited objectives.  Typically the most likely type of attack is to conduct a physical attack and use the electronic attack, whether it’s radio, radar, or IT assets, to delay the enemy’s response.  This is why you have to take an electronic attack seriously if it’s being launched by a country which has a military capable of attacking you physically–it might be just a jamming attack, it might be a precursor to an invasion.

Bottom line here is this: if you use it for communication, it’s a target and has been for some time.

• The Spanish Civil War and the Rise of Cyberwar
• Et Tu, TIC?
• Comments on SCAP 2008
• The Rise of the Slow Denial of Service
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”

And by “We”, I mean the security industry as a whole.  And yes, this is your public-policy lesson for today, let me drag my soapbox over here and sit for a spell while I talk at you.

By “Survive”, I mean that we need some kind of self-regulatory framework that fulfills the niche that PCI-DSS occupies currently. Keep reading, I’ll explain.

And the “Why” is a magical phrase, everybody say it after me: self-regulatory organization.  In other words, the IT industry (and the Payment Card Industry) needs to regulate itself before it crosses the line into being considered for statutory regulation (ie, making a law) by the Federal Government.

Remember the PCI-DSS hearings with the House Committe on Homeland Security (AKA the Thompson Committee)?  All the Security Twits were abuzz about it, and it did my heart great justice to hear all the cool kids become security and public policy wonks at least for an afternoon.  Well, there is a little secret here and that is that when Congress gets involved, they’re gathering information to determine if they need to regulate an industry.  That’s about all Congress can do: make laws that you (and the Executive Branch) have to follow, maybe divvy up some tax money, and bring people in to testify.  Other than that, it’s just positioning to gain favor with other politicians and maybe some votes in the next election.

Regulation means audits and more compliance.  They go together like TCP and IP.  Most regulatory laws have at least some designation for a party who will perform oversight.  They have to do this because, well, if you’re not audited/assessed/evaluated/whatever, then it’s really an optional law, which doesn’t make sense at all.

Yay Audits photo by joebeone.

Another magical phrase that the public policy sector can share with the information security world: audit burden.  Audit burden is how much a company or individual pays both in direct costs (paying the auditors) and in indirect costs (babysitting the auditors, producing evidence for the auditors, taking people away from making money to talk to auditors, “audit requirements”, etc).  I think we can all agree that low audit burden is good, high audit burden is bad.  In fact, I think that’s one of the problems with FISMA as implemented is that it has a high audit burden with moderately tangible results. But I digress, this post is about PCI-DSS.

There’s even a concept that is mulling around in the back of my head to make a metric that compares the audit burden to the amount of security that it provides to the amount of assurance that it provides against statutory regulation.  It almost sounds like the start of a balanced scorecard for security management frameworks, now if I could get @alexhutton to jump on it, his quant brain would churn out great things in short order.

But this is the lesson for today: self-regulation is preferrable to legislation.

• Self-regulation is defined by people in the industry.  Think about the State Bar Association setting the standards for who is allowed to practice law.
• Standards ideally become codified versions of “best practices”.  OK, this is if they’re done correctly, more to follow.
• Standards are more flexible than laws.  As hard/cumbersome as it is to change a standard, the time involved in changing a law is prohibitive most of the time unless you’re running for reelection.
• Standards sometimes can be “tainted” to force out competition, laws are even more so.

The sad fact here is that if we don’t figure out as an industry how to make PCI-DSS or any other forms of self-regulation work, Congress will regulate for us.  Don’t like PCI-DSS because of the audit burden, wait until you have a law that requires you to do the same controls framework.  It will be the same thing, only with bigger penalties for failure, larger audit burdens to avoid the larger penalties, larger industries created to satisfy the market demand for audit.  Come meet the new regulatory body, same as the old only bigger and meaner. =)

However, self-regulation works if you do it right, and by right I mean this:

• The process is transparent and not the product of a secret back-room cabbal.
• Representation from all the shareholders.  For PCI-DSS, that would be Visa/MasterCard, banks, processors, large merchants, small merchants, and some of the actual customers.
• The standards committee knows how to compromise and come to a consensus.  IE, we can’t have both full hard drive encryption, a WAF, code review, and sacrificing of chickens in the server room, so we’ll make one of the 4 mandatory.
• The regulatory organization has a grievance process for its constituency to present valid (AKA “Not just more whining”) discrepencies in the standards and processes for clarification or consideration for change.
• The standard is “owned” by every member of the constituency.  Right now, people governed by PCI-DSS are not feeling that the standard is their standard and that they have a say in what comprises the standard and that they are the ones being helped by the standard.  Some of that is true, some of that is an image problem.  The way you combat this is by doing the things that I mentioned in the previous bullets.

Hmm, sounds like making an ISO standard, which brings its own set of politics.

While we need some form of self-regulation, right now PCI-DSS and ISO 27001 are the closest that we have in the private sector.  Yeah, it sucks, but it sucks the least, just like our form of government.

• Observations on PCI-DSS and Circular Arguments
• Metricon 5 Wrapup
• Blow-By-Blow on S.773–The Cybersecurity Act of 2009–Part 3
• Preliminary Findings on Cybersecurity Review Now Out
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”

So how does the Guerilla-CISO staff communicate with the locals on jaunts to foreign lands such as Deleware, New Jersey, and Afghanistan?  The answer is simple, we use interpreters, known in infantrese as “terps”.  Yes, you might not trust them deep down inside because they harbor all kinds of loyalties so complex that you can spend the rest of your life figuring out, but you can’t do the job without them.

But in remembering how we used our interpreters, I’m reminded of some basic concepts that might be transferable to the IT security and risk management world.  Or maybe not, at least kick back and enjoy the storytelling while it’s free. =)

Know When to Treat Them Like Mushrooms: And by that, we mean “keep them in the dark and feed them bullsh*t”.  What really mean is to tell potentially adversarial people that you’re working with the least amount of information that they need to do their job in order to limit the frequency and impact of them doing something nasty.  When you’re planning a patrol, the worst way to ruin your week is to tell the terps when you’re leaving and where you’re going.  That way, they can call their Taliban friends when you’re not looking and they’ll have a surprise waiting for you.  No, it won’t be a birthday cake.  The way I would get a terp is that one would be assigned to me by our battalion staff and the night before the patrol I would tell the specific terp that we were leaving in the morning, give them a time that I would come by to check up on them, and that they would need to bring enough gear for 5 days.  Before they got into my vehicles and we rolled away, I would look through their gear to make sure they didn’t have any kind of communications device (radio or telephone) to let their buddies know where we were at.

Fudge the Schedule to Minimize Project Risk: Terps–even the good ones–are notorious for being on “local time”, which for a patrol means one hour later than you told them you were leaving.  The good part about this is that it’s way better than true local time, which has a margin of error of a week and a half.  In order to keep from being late, always tell the terps when you’ll need them an hour and a half before you really do, then check up on them every half hour or so.  Out on patrol, I would cut that margin down to half an hour because they didn’t have all the typical distractions to make them late.

Talk Slowly, Avoid Complex Sentences: The first skill to learn when using terps is to say things that their understanding of English can handle.  When they’re doing their job for you, simple sentences works best.  I know I’m walking down the road of heresy, but this is where quantitative risk assessment done poorly doesn’t work for me because now I something that’s entirely too complex to interpret to the non-IT crowd.  In fact, it probably is worse than no risk assessment at all because it comes accross as “consultantspeak” with no tangible link back to reality.

Put Your Resources Where the Greatest Risk Is: To a vehicle patrol out in the desert, most of the action happens at the front of the patrol.  That’s where you need a terp.  That way, the small stuff, such as asking a local farmer to move his goats and sheep out of the road so you can drive through, stays small–without a terp up front, a 2-minute conversation becomes 15 minutes of hassle as you first have to get the terp up to the front of the patrol then tell them what’s going on.

Pigs, Chicken, and Roadside Bombs: We all know the story about how in the eggs and bacon breakfast, the chicken is a participant but the pig is committed.  Well, when I go on a patrol with a terp, I want them to be committed.  That means riding in the front vehicle with me.  It’s my “poison pill” defense in knowing that if my terp tipped off the Taliban and they blow up the lead vehicle with me in it, at least they would also get the terp.  A little bit of risk-sharing in a venture goes a long way at getting honesty out of people.

Share Risk in a Culturally-Acceptable Way: Our terps would balk at the idea of riding in the front vehicle most of the time.  I don’t blame them, it’s the vehicle most likely to be turned into 2 tons of slag metal thanks to pressure plates hooked up to IEDs.  The typical American response is something along the lines of “It’s your country, you’re riding up front with me so if I get blown up, you do to”.  Yes, I share that ideal, but the Afghanis don’t understand country loyalties, the only thing they understand is their tribe, their village, and their family.  The Guerilla-CISO method here is to get down inside their heads by saying “Come ride with me, if we die, we die together like brothers”.  You’re saying the same thing basically but you’re framing it in a cultural context that they can’t say no to.

Reward People Willing to Embrace Your Risks: One of the ways that I was effective in dealing with the terps was that I would check in occassionally to see if they were doing alright during down-time from missions.  They would show me some Bollywood movies dubbed into Pashto, I would give them fatty American foods (Little Debbie FTW!).  They would play their music.  I would make fun of their music and amaze them because they never figured out how I knew that the song had drums, a stringed instrument, and somebody singing (hey, all their favorite songs have that).  They would share their “foot bread” (the bread is stamped flat by people walking on it before it’s cooked, I was too scared to ask if they washed their feet first) with me.  I would teach them how to say “Barbara (their assignment scheduler back on an airbase) was a <censored> for putting them out in the middle of nowhere on this assignment” and other savory phrases.  These forays weren’t for my own enjoyment, but to build rapport with the terps so that they would understand when I would give them some risk management love, Guerilla-CISO style.

Police, Afghan Army and an Interpreter photo by ME!.  The guy in the baseball cap and glasses is one of the best terps I ever worked with.

• Security Assessments as Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”
• An Open Letter to NIST About SP 800-30
• Opportunity Costs and the 20 Critical Security Controls