Windows 10: Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

Lorenzo Lupoli · Jun 14, 2023

My name is Lorenzo Lupoli, and I am a second-year student at LUISS Guido Carli's "Policy and Governance in Europe" master's program. Currently, I am working on my thesis, which focuses on the field of cybersecurity. As part of my research, I have been conducting interviews with industry experts to gain valuable insights.The specific topic I am exploring is how the implementation of the Cyber Resilience Act could potentially impact open-source software. Given your extensive knowledge and knowhow in the field, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to have a brief online interview with you f

:)

Brink · Jun 14, 2023

Announcing: new British Standard for cyber risk and resilience

Technology is an integral part of the fabric of everyday life. There is almost no organization that does not rely on digital services in some way in order to survive. The opportunity that technology provides also brings with it more vulnerabilities and threats as organizations and data become more connected and available. This trend results in a common gap found in the decision-making process at large organizations. Often information security and cybersecurity have been viewed as a function of IT and therefore, the information security departments have been managed outside of normal business decision-making processes. This is an approach we no longer have the luxury of indulging.

Organizations need a holistic approach to implement digital transformation projects to safeguard their security. This involves focusing on both the opportunity and the threat of any change. To do this effectively the accountability for cyber risk and resilience needs to sit firmly with executive management and the governing body. However, a skills gap exists at this level with many governing body members having started their careers before the internet era. Even when willing to adopt responsibility for building a cyber resilient organization, senior executives are often confused by the technical language that risk management and cybersecurity professionals speak. As well, they may also encourage cybersecurity professionals to speak directly to the board. Therefore, we also need to equip board members with the tools to ask the right questions and ensure the correct levels of risk to build cyber resilient organizations.

That is why, nearly two years ago, the BSI Risk Management Committee started working to develop new guidance aimed at helping executive leadership better understand and manage the technology risks to their organizations. I was asked to lead a group of government executives, regulators, professional bodies and technical experts with a goal of directly addressing the realities and challenges of managing cyber risk in a digital world. This goal led us to draft the new British Standard BS31111. The standard aims to provide guidance to enterprise organizations regarding cyber risk and resilience, and to address the gap in IT decision making.

The standard includes:

Parameters to build concrete guidelines into governing bodies

Identification of areas of focus an organization should have in order to build a cyber resilient enterprise

Assessment questions management can ask to challenge the organization regarding how it is building cyber resilience into the business

Cyber risk and resilience needs to be driven from the top of the organization to ensure that the right culture is set across all business decision making. Executive management must ensure that there is a clear risk and resilience strategy set across the organization, as well as ensuring that there is a strong management structure in place that details the responsibilities and expectations of everyone to maintain security. As Microsoft’s own CEO Satya Nadella has said, “Cybersecurity is like going to the gym. You can’t get better by watching others, you’ve got to get there every day”. Satya’s comments underline the reasoning behind this standard, emphasizing the need to build cyber resilience into day to day operations and not treat it as a standalone project or program.

Engaging with risk management and cyber resilience principles can be complicated and it is easy to get bogged down by technical jargon. To help, we created a visual (figure 1) intended to illustrate the areas required to develop cyber resilience and the key responsibilities of the board.

Source:BS3111:2018 Figure 1

Key tenets:

The responsibility of any Board of Directors is to clearly set the direction of business activity. They ultimately sign off on major decisions and investments and need to ensure that activity is sustainable for the business.

Executive management and the governing body are mostly responsible for the roof and foundation, with oversight on the activity of the pillars. Any building is only as good as its foundation and the same is true for building cyber resilience.

The importance of culture for security

Without a strong culture of security, it is easy for decisions to be made that expose an organization. Many of the major breaches witnessed in recent years can be traced back to a lack of ownership and leadership regarding the need for strong cybersecurity measures across the organization, along with ill-informed investment decisions. The executive management and members of the board need to clearly focus on the benefits of any digital investment AND the level of security outcomes required to support that investment. Hopefully, the new British Standard BS31111 will provide best practice aims and expectations for the responsibility and accountability of boards and executive leadership to drive change.

The publication of the standard is only the first step. It will be important to promote the need for every organization to safeguard their enterprise and their customers, more than we do today. Many boards and governing bodies are becoming more “cyber aware” and understanding their need to build cyber risk into their decision making. This publication aims to enable leadership teams and boards to build awareness and decision-making protocols across the organization.

In my short tenure with Microsoft, I have already witnessed a strong internal security culture, focused on building resilient and secure cloud platforms. I look forward to working with my customers to help them develop their own cyber resilient foundations and cultures, ensuring that Microsoft’s capabilities support them in that endeavor.

SIÂN JOHN,
Executive Security Advisor, Strategic Enterprise and Cybersecurity Group
Click to expand...

Source: Announcing: new British Standard for cyber risk and resilience Microsoft Secure

Brink · Jun 14, 2023

Announcing: new British Standard for cyber risk and resilience

Technology is an integral part of the fabric of everyday life. There is almost no organization that does not rely on digital services in some way in order to survive. The opportunity that technology provides also brings with it more vulnerabilities and threats as organizations and data become more connected and available. This trend results in a common gap found in the decision-making process at large organizations. Often information security and cybersecurity have been viewed as a function of IT and therefore, the information security departments have been managed outside of normal business decision-making processes. This is an approach we no longer have the luxury of indulging.

Organizations need a holistic approach to implement digital transformation projects to safeguard their security. This involves focusing on both the opportunity and the threat of any change. To do this effectively the accountability for cyber risk and resilience needs to sit firmly with executive management and the governing body. However, a skills gap exists at this level with many governing body members having started their careers before the internet era. Even when willing to adopt responsibility for building a cyber resilient organization, senior executives are often confused by the technical language that risk management and cybersecurity professionals speak. As well, they may also encourage cybersecurity professionals to speak directly to the board. Therefore, we also need to equip board members with the tools to ask the right questions and ensure the correct levels of risk to build cyber resilient organizations.

That is why, nearly two years ago, the BSI Risk Management Committee started working to develop new guidance aimed at helping executive leadership better understand and manage the technology risks to their organizations. I was asked to lead a group of government executives, regulators, professional bodies and technical experts with a goal of directly addressing the realities and challenges of managing cyber risk in a digital world. This goal led us to draft the new British Standard BS31111. The standard aims to provide guidance to enterprise organizations regarding cyber risk and resilience, and to address the gap in IT decision making.

The standard includes:

Parameters to build concrete guidelines into governing bodies

Identification of areas of focus an organization should have in order to build a cyber resilient enterprise

Assessment questions management can ask to challenge the organization regarding how it is building cyber resilience into the business

Cyber risk and resilience needs to be driven from the top of the organization to ensure that the right culture is set across all business decision making. Executive management must ensure that there is a clear risk and resilience strategy set across the organization, as well as ensuring that there is a strong management structure in place that details the responsibilities and expectations of everyone to maintain security. As Microsoft’s own CEO Satya Nadella has said, “Cybersecurity is like going to the gym. You can’t get better by watching others, you’ve got to get there every day”. Satya’s comments underline the reasoning behind this standard, emphasizing the need to build cyber resilience into day to day operations and not treat it as a standalone project or program.

Engaging with risk management and cyber resilience principles can be complicated and it is easy to get bogged down by technical jargon. To help, we created a visual (figure 1) intended to illustrate the areas required to develop cyber resilience and the key responsibilities of the board.

Source:BS3111:2018 Figure 1

Key tenets:

The responsibility of any Board of Directors is to clearly set the direction of business activity. They ultimately sign off on major decisions and investments and need to ensure that activity is sustainable for the business.

Executive management and the governing body are mostly responsible for the roof and foundation, with oversight on the activity of the pillars. Any building is only as good as its foundation and the same is true for building cyber resilience.

The importance of culture for security

Without a strong culture of security, it is easy for decisions to be made that expose an organization. Many of the major breaches witnessed in recent years can be traced back to a lack of ownership and leadership regarding the need for strong cybersecurity measures across the organization, along with ill-informed investment decisions. The executive management and members of the board need to clearly focus on the benefits of any digital investment AND the level of security outcomes required to support that investment. Hopefully, the new British Standard BS31111 will provide best practice aims and expectations for the responsibility and accountability of boards and executive leadership to drive change.

The publication of the standard is only the first step. It will be important to promote the need for every organization to safeguard their enterprise and their customers, more than we do today. Many boards and governing bodies are becoming more “cyber aware” and understanding their need to build cyber risk into their decision making. This publication aims to enable leadership teams and boards to build awareness and decision-making protocols across the organization.

In my short tenure with Microsoft, I have already witnessed a strong internal security culture, focused on building resilient and secure cloud platforms. I look forward to working with my customers to help them develop their own cyber resilient foundations and cultures, ensuring that Microsoft’s capabilities support them in that endeavor.

SIÂN JOHN,
Executive Security Advisor, Strategic Enterprise and Cybersecurity Group
Click to expand...

Source: Announcing: new British Standard for cyber risk and resilience Microsoft Secure

Brink · Jun 14, 2023

Microsoft perspective on cyber resilience

In the wake of recent ransomware outbreaks, I wanted to understand how impacted firms have evolved their thinking on cyber resilience planning and implementation. I asked the Detection and Response Team at Microsoft, who help our customers proactively and in real time to respond and recover from cyberattacks, to share their experiences. I’ve included below a few anonymized customer scenarios the team shared with me, which point to the acute need for a cyber resilience plan.

What follows is a reference framework of Microsoft capabilities which can help our customers become more agile in the face of modern attacks. In other words, this post is about mapping the road to cyber resilience.

Why cyber resilience matters

Organizations globally are highly dependent on technology to conduct personal and business-related tasks. As of the end of Q1CY2017, there were over 3.7B Internet users worldwide and this population is growing. As Internet adoption is growing, the attack surface is growing. The current cybersecurity threat landscape creates a real risk to people and assets. Therefore, organizations should maintain a balance between allowing access and managing risk. Commonly, enterprise organizations approach cybersecurity by implementing tools and technologies and personnel for “protection” and “incident response”. While this is important, the root purpose of implementing cybersecurity tools and technologies is business continuity. Enterprise organizations should also be thinking at a strategic level about the “big picture” of how to fortify their critical systems, IT infrastructure, and data centers to stay resilient in the face of human errors and cyberthreats that cause downtime. This is where a cyber resilience strategy comes into play. Organizations need to build a cyber resilience strategy and execute a cyber resilience program specifically tailored to their business needs to ensure business continuity in the event of a security incident.

According to Accenture’s “State of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust”, while 75% of all survey takers say they have high cybersecurity confidence levels, only 37% claim they have confidence in their organization’s ability to monitor for breaches and 36% claim confidence in their ability to minimize disruptions. According to Gartner, the average cost of downtime is USD $5,600 per minute—over USD $300,000 per hour. Human error is the most common contributor to downtime. Some studies conclude that human error accounts for 75% of downtime.

With organizations more reliant on IT than ever before, it is important to acknowledge business continuity and disaster response (BCDR) as a vital component to the entire organization, instead of as an issue that has implications for IT teams only. Every enterprise organization needs to be prepared to handle outages caused by unforeseen events. Downtime of critical applications and services could lead to a stop in productivity and operations, lost revenues, and lower customer confidence in the organization. A strong cyber resilience plan effectively executed can help organizations’ computer systems, IT infrastructure and data centers withstand impact from cyberthreats and human error...
Click to expand...

Read more: Microsoft perspective on cyber resilience | Microsoft Secure Blog

Windows 10: Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

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Request for an interview: expert opinion on the Cyber Resilience Act

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Announcing: new British Standard for cyber risk and resilience

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