A while ago, a buddy of mine was on travel, leaving his family at home. He called home from the airport whilst awaiting a flight and got some interesting news. He'd winterized their house several months earlier, which included shutting off the hose bibs from inside the house and purging the water from the pipes so they didn't freeze and burst. Well, about 36 hours prior to his call, there had been a need to run water from the faucet on the back of the house, so his wife had turned the hose bib on. However, being unfamiliar with all of the pipes and everything running through the closet, she'd also accidently turned off the gas to the house, which caused all of the pilot lights (on the gas range, in the gas fireplaces, and for the water heater) to go out. Listening to this, my friend started asking questions of his wife, many of which were answered "I don't know".

Listening to him tell this story, it became clear what his concerns were, but I wanted to hear it from him. While his wife was saying, "honey, you're going to come home from a long flight with several stops, layovers, and delays and not have any hot water to shower...sorry", he was hearing that there were possibly places in the house where gas could be seeping into the house. Thankfully, the gas used in homes smells, so it can be detected, but if the source is in an enclosed room...you see where I'm going with this.

I thought about this for a bit while I was running the other day, and it occurred to me that this almost exactly mirrors current incident response models. I know, I know...bear with me here. Consider the wife in this story to be the CEO (hey, don't we all???), and my friend his a CISO or security admin. The kids and pets are the staff. In this case, we have an "incident"...the gas coming into the house was shut off long enough to cause the pilot lights to go out. The CEO, based on her sphere of perception, understands the issue to be one of inconvenience...lack of hot water means no hot shower. She feels that they can wait until my buddy gets home to deal with it. However, my friend sees an even bigger "threat"...not only to property (ie, his house) but more importantly, to the health and safety of his family (corporate officers failing to accurately identify critical assets).

In response to this, my friend decided to embark on a training and educational approach to changing the "corporate culture" of his family to be even more cognizant of the issues and potential impacts of such incidents. In part, this is where the story takes a turn and ends differently from what happens in business (corporate, government, etc.) organizations today.

So how does all this apply to these business organizations? Look around...or look here. It's quite a long list, but see any duplicates, either in what reportedly occurred, or in the name of the organization?

So, how do we fix this, you ask? Glad you asked!! Apparently, security overall (and not just IR) is something that is not part of the "corporate culture" of many organizations. Responding to incidents often times gets me nothing but blank stares when I ask questions about the status of systems, where systems are "located" in relation to each other, etc. That's nothing unusual.

Speaking of "corporate culture", when I was in the Marine Corps, we had a corporate culture, one that was easy to remember - "every Marine a rifleman." Basically, what that meant was that every single Marine, officer or enlisted, must be qualified in care, feeding, and effective and deadly use of the M-16 rifle. Every Marine received training in its use, and had to go through annual requalification. The same was true for officers...up through the rank of Captain, every officer had to qualify annually with the M-16 as well as their own TO weapon, the M-9. But this wasn't all we did...this was part of the many things we did, but it was part of our corporate culture. I believe this served us well in many incidents, particular in Iraq, where the "front lines" were often right in front of you, and it didn't matter if you were an infantry Marine or a cook or a Motor T driver.

My point is that we can talk about IR all day long, but things won't change unless someone with the ability to change the corporate culture does so. Everyone, particularly the IT staff, needs to be more security conscious, and be more familiar with the assets their protecting. What are the critical assets of the company, as defined by the CEO? How does an IT admin's job of maintaining servers and systems relate to accomlishing the mission of protecting those assets?

Also, consider this...in the military, everyone's trained in "immediate actions". If an M-16 jams, every Marine knows the immediate actions to perform to get that weapon back into service. Marines on patrol know that if caught in a near ambush, then the response is to attack the source of the ambush, immediately and with maximum violence. Consider this...why can't the IT staff be trained in "immediate actions", as well? If unusual traffic is seen on the network or anomolous behavior appears on a system, there are things that the IT staff can do immediately to identify the issue. There are other things that they can do in order to quickly address the situation.

It all starts with a top-down approach to the corporate culture. From there, IT staffs need to receive training...functional, hands-on training that applies to the systems they work with every day. Going away to Linux-centric training for someone in an all- or predominantly-Windows shop is a waste of time and money. There needs to be core, central set of knowledge and training that every IT staff member receives and is responsible for knowing...in the Marines, every officer, be they a pilot, a communicator, or a supply officer, goes through the same training at The Basic School. From there, certain members of the IT staff should receive specific training based on their areas of responsibility, be they routers, firewalls, servers, applications, etc. They need to understand these areas and systems inside-out, in much the same way a Marine can field strip, clean, and reassemble the M-16.

So, if you're reading all this and you're not someone in the IR business, you're probably thinking, "oh, he's just saying this so that he can get our money." No, I'm saying this so that you don't loose my data...my SSN, my credit card number, etc. Or my wife's. Or, several years from now, my daughter's or my niece's and nephew's. We see it in the media all the time, with these high profile "hacks" involving someone breaking in and stealing data, or sensitive personal information being lost. Or critical applications and systems being taken over, compromised, and p0wned. These incidents are no longer the result of joy riders on the Information Superhighway...that ended a while ago. There is a profit motive behind this...these crimes are being committed because there is money involved. There needs to be a shift in the corporate culture such that this data is better protected, and when something does happen, the response is something more than paralysis. What would you do if you had a fire in your home? Would you evacuate your family, and if the fire were small and isolated enough, would you attempt to put it out? Would you call the fire department? Dumb questions, I know...but when incidents are occurring today, many corporate cultures make it okay to ignore the situation and simply go back to sleep. Worse, the situation is recognized as something unusual, but everyone is paralyzed, and the fire department gets called only after the house has burned down.

Thoughts?