Protecting sensitive data

Last month I wrote an article on key things to consider when protecting high valued assets or sensitive data.
The article called Security Tip of the Month: Protecting Highly Sensitive Information addressed some of the key items that organizations should consider when protecting data that has the possible impact on an organization that is irreparable. As my article stated the cost of protecting this data tends to be higher than most data. Fact is that this data is not traditionally just sensitive such as credit card data, or HR data. Key indicators of what is High Value Data can be summed up like this.

Assets that are considered to be of high value will frequently have the potential to cause the following conditions if they are lost or divulged:
•        Loss of life - such as an informant list
•        Regulatory fines - such as financial performance data
•        Significant damage to the business - such as code signing and encryption keys (private) or trade secrets

Because of the nature of this data it's essential that the data be under the control of the chief information security officer (CISO) of the organization.

Kill Chain


In the article I refer to using a Kill chain to protect the data.  This image illustrates the basic operations or a kill chain.



The concept of a kill chain comes from the paper  "Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains" is an excellent read and effective means to security HVA data.

The following table shows some ideas that are effective means to set up a kill chain of protections to slow attackers through detection, denying access, disrupting, degrading, and deceiving.



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