More on not logging - “Reverse Compliance”

May 8th, 2008 Drazen Drazic Posted in Disclosure Laws, Forensics, PCI, PCI DSS, Risk Management, cyber crime, governance |

Declan’s recent post on logging being a double edged sword started some interesting discussion. Anton Chuvakin follows-up further on his blog and writes:

“Reverse compliance” is a motivation to purposefully avoid technologies that have a chance of telling you that you are NOT in compliance. Sadly, logging is featured very high on the list of such technologies that a) tell you about all the problems with your compliance posture (e.g. direct violations of regulatory requirements, lack of controls, inefficient controls, policies not followed, etc) as well as b) are mandated by various regulations (e.g. PCI DSS) and c) actively used by auditors for finding compliance issues.

Read the rest of Anton’s post.

3 Responses to “More on not logging - “Reverse Compliance””

  1. Big Galoot Says:

    “Reverse Compliance”, “Logging Double edged sword” etc. Its all ‘ORM’ by a different name. Its all good stuff.

    A while back on b or b we wrote a standard covering these shonky, head-in-the-sand, principles. Known as Ostrich Risk Management 101, or simply ‘ORM’.

    http://beastorbuddha.com/2008/02/13/big-galoot-diatribe-bgs-ostrich-risk-management-101/

    DD - how’s that ORM flow chart coming along ? Now might be a good time to post it up !

    :-)

    BG.

  2. Funniest stuff ever over on the loganalysis mailing list, worth a peek, this BorB post reminded me of it. It’s a thread called ‘Star Trek and log integrity”…

    http://www.loganalysis.org/pipermail/loganalysis/2008-May/subject.html#start

    SNIP

    http://www.cbs.com/video/?showname=classics/star_trek

    There’s no obvious way to link directly to an episode, but if you click to
    page 5, you’ll see episode 20, “Court Martial,” in which Captain Kirk is
    proved innocent of a crew member’s death after Spock is able to prove that
    the computer logs have been tampered with. I am *so* going to incorporate
    this into my logging tutorial :-)” tbird

    “What do you expect from a starship that runs on Windows-24k? Microsoft
    added support for syslog in 2348 - citing customer demand - but still
    has no Enterprise-class log architecture.” ranum

    “Captain Picard: “Data, review for format string vulnerabilities in
    syslog-ng. ”

    Commander Data, as Picard exhales: “Done. However we must wait for the
    Change Advisory Board to approve the update. They are currently
    backlogged by 391 years 3 months 6 days 46 minutes and 23 seconds.” wynn

    D2

  3. @D2, sensational mate! LOL.

    @BG, post Auscert, we’ll formally launch the Ostrich Risk Management certification program and official website. To begin with, it will be a self-assessment examination and those who successfully pass will be able to proudly display the “ORM Certified Organisation” logo on their website. At this stage, we are still to finalise the pricing per year.

    In 2009, we will introduce the “ORMCA” (Ostrich Risk Management Certified Auditor) certification program. From then on, organisations must engage only approved ORMCAs to perform ORM audits. Pricing on the ORMCA certification is also yet to be determined but we’re thinking around the USD10K per year plus training costs. While the costs may seem high, we will require no pre-requisite knowledge and experience. How good is that? You can’t put a price on the value that will add to a career. Forgot your MBAs!

    Stay tuned!

    Early bird expressions of interest in both the company certification and ORMCA program can be left here as responses or emailed to me through the “Contact Me” section on this website.

    DD

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