Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
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| Dana Gardner |
I'm now joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast, Raf Los, who is the Chief Security Evangelist at HP Software. Welcome back Raf. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Rafal Los: Glad to be back, Dana.
Gardner: And where are you joining us from today, where is your travel taking you?
Los: Well we are at the HP Protect 2012, here in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee where the sun is shining and the birds are chirping country music.
Gardner: We have a fascinating show today, we're going to learn how Liberty Mutual Insurance is building security more deeply into its business, and with that, I’d like to introduce our special guest, John McKenna, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for Liberty Mutual.
Welcome to the show, John.
John McKenna: Glad to be here.
Gardner: You're both at the HP Protect show in Nashville, so let’s focus on security a bit. Why is security so important to your business now, and in what ways are you investing?
McKenna: It’s pretty clear to us that the world has changed in terms of the threats and in terms of the kinds of technologies that we're using these days to enable our business. Certainly, there's an obligation there, a responsibility to protect our customers’ information as well as making sure that our business operations can continue to support those customers.
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| John McKenna |
In addition to that, we have our own employees, who we feel we need to protect to enable them to work and get the job done to support our customers, while doing so in a very secure workplace environment.
Gardner: You started off by saying that things are different. You recognized that. How do you generally think things are different now than, say, four or five years ago?
McKenna: I'll start with just the technology landscape itself. From mobility platforms and social networking to cloud computing, all of those are introducing different attack vectors, different opportunities for the bad guys to take advantage of.
Reducing the threat
We need to make sure that we can use those technologies and enable our business to use them effectively to grow our business and service our customers, while at the same time, protecting them so that we reduce the threat. We will never eliminate it, but we can reduce the opportunities for the bad guys to take advantage.
Los: John, you talk about for your customers. From a security perspective, your customers are your external customers as well as internal, correct?
McKenna: We absolutely have our internal customer as well. We have partners, vendors, agencies, and brokers that we're doing business with. They're all part of the supply chain. We have an obligation to make sure that whatever tools and technologies we are enabling them with, we’re protecting that as well.
Gardner: John, Liberty Mutual, of course, is a large and long-time leader in insurance. Tell us about the breadth and depth of your company. I imagine you're quite dispersed, as well, as with many different lines of services. Help us understand the complexity that you're managing, when it comes to bringing security across this full domain.
McKenna: We're a global company in the Fortune 100 list. We have $35 billion in revenue and we have about 45,000 employees worldwide. We offer products across the personal and commercial lines products, or P&C, and life insurance products. We’ve got somewhere in the range of 900-plus offices globally.
So we have lots of people. We have lots of connections and we have a lot of customers and suppliers who are all part of this business. It’s a very complex business operation, and there are a lot of challenges to make sure that we're supporting the customers, the business, and also the projects that are continually trying to build new technology and new capabilities.
In the past, security was really something that was delegated and was an afterthought in some respect.
Gardner: Raf, when we talk about what’s different in companies, one of the things I'm noticing that I think is pretty important when it comes to security, is that in the past, security was really something that was delegated and was an afterthought in some respect.
But I'm seeing a lot of companies now that, when they're planning new products and services, start asking those questions right-away. Is this something we can deliver securely? Should we bring this product to market in this way, when security concerns or privacy concerns are something that we need to consider for our brand, and our employees’ and our supply chain’s protection?
It seems to me that security is now a thought right at the very beginning of planning for new services. Is that the case in your travel?
Los: That’s what I'm seeing, and there's still the maturation that’s happening across the enterprise spectrum where a lot of the organizations -- believe it or not, in 2012 -- are still standing up formalized security organizations.
Not a given
So security is not a given yet, where that the department exists, is well-funded, well-staffed, and well-respected.You're getting to that state where security is not simply an afterthought or as it was in an organization in my past job history a decade ago or so. In those types of companies, they would get it done and the say, "By the way, security, if you take a look at this before we launch it, make sure it’s given virtual thumbs up. You’ve got about 20 minutes to go."
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| Raf Los |
It's sort of a cliché, but IT technology risks understanding acceptance and guidance. I think that’s where it’s starting to win over the business leaders. It’s not that people don’t care about security. They do. They just don’t know they do. It’s up to us to make sure that they understand the context of their business.
Gardner: John, is that ringing true for you at Liberty Mutual, where there is a more concern and thought put into security as you're bringing products and services to market and as you're considering what new products and services to bring to market?
McKenna: It absolutely is. It goes from the top on down. Our board certainly is reading the headlines every day. Where there are new breaches, their first question is, "Can this happen to us?"
As we're rolling out new capabilities, we have a responsibility to protect the brand and the reputation.
So it certainly starts there, but I think that there absolutely is an appreciation at our strategic business units, the leadership, as well as the IT folks that are supporting them, that as we're rolling out new capabilities, we have a responsibility to protect the brand and the reputation. So they're always thinking first about exactly what the threats and the vulnerabilities might be and what we have to do about it.
We’ve got a lot of programs underway in our security program to try to train our developers how to develop application, secure coding practices, and what those need to be. We’ve got lots of work related to our security awareness program, so that the entire population of 45,000 employees has an understanding of what their responsibilities are to protect our company's information assets.
I will use a term used by a colleague that Raf and I know. Our intent is not to secure the company 100 percent. That’s impossible, but we intend to provide responsible defenses to make sure that we are protecting the right assets in the right way.
Los: That’s very interesting. You mentioned something about how the board reads the headlines, and I want to get your take on this. I'm going to venture a guess. It’s not because you’ve managed to get them enough paper, reams of paper with reports that say we have a thousand vulnerabilities. It’s not why they care.
Quite a challenge
McKenna: Absolutely right. When I say they're reading the headlines, they're reading what’s happening to other companies. They're asking, "Can that happen to us?" It's quite a challenge -- a challenge to give them the view, the visibility that is right, that speaks to exactly what our vulnerabilities are and what we are going about it. At the same time, I'm not giving them a report of a hundred pages that lists every potential incident or vulnerability that we uncovered.
Los: In your organization, whose job is it? We’ve had triangulation between the technical nomenclature, technical language, the bits and bytes, and then the stuff at the board actually understands. I'm pretty sure SQL injection is not something that a board member would understand.
McKenna: It's my job and it's working with my CIO to make sure that we are communicating at the right levels and very meaningfully, and that we’ve, in fact, got the right perspective on this ourselves. You mentioned risk and moving to more of a risk model. We're all a bit challenged on maturing, what that model, that framework, and those metrics are.
When I think about how we should be investing in security at Liberty Mutual and making the business case, sometimes it's very difficult, but I think about it at the top level. If you think about any business model, one approach is a product approach, where you get specific products and you develop go-to-market strategies around those.
If you think about the bad guys and their products, either they're looking to steal customer information, they are looking to steal intellectual property (IP), or they're looking to just shut down systems and disable services. So at the high level, we need to figure out exactly where we fit in that food chain? How much bigger risk are we at at that product level?
It's working with my CIO to make sure that we are communicating at the right levels and very meaningfully.
Gardner: I've seen another on-ramp to getting the attention and creating enough emphasis on the importance of security through the compliance and regulation side of things, and certainly the payment card industry (PCI) comes to mind. Has this been something that's worked for you at Liberty Mutual, or you have certain compliance issues that perhaps spur along behaviors and patterns that can lead to longer-term security benefit?
McKenna: We're a highly-regulated industry, and PCI is perhaps a good example. For our personal insurance business unit, we've just achieved compliance through QSA. We’ve worked awfully hard at that. It’s been a convenient step for us to address some of these foundational security improvements that we needed to make.
We're not done yet. We need to extend that and now we're working on that, so that our entire systems have the same level of protections and controls that are required by PCI, but even beyond PCI. We're looking to extend those to all personal identifiable information, any sensitive information in the company, making sure that those assets have the same protections, the same controls that are essential.
Gardner: Raf, do you see that as well that the compliance issues are really on-ramp, or an accelerant, to some of these better security practices that we've been talking about?
Los: Absolutely. You can look at compliance in one of two ways. You can either look at a compliance from a peer’s security perspective and say compliance is hogwash, just a checkbox exercise. There’s simply no reason that it's ever going to improve security.
Being an optimist
Or you can be an optimist. I choose to be an optimist, and take my cue from a mentor of mine and say, "Look, it's a great way to demonstrate that you can do the minimum due diligence, satisfy the law and the regulation, while using it as a springboard to do other things."
And John has been talking about this too. Foundationally, I see things like PCI and other regulations, HIPAA, taking things that security would not ordinarily get involved in. For, example, fantastic asset management and change management and organization.
When we think security, the first thing that often we hear is probably not a good change management infrastructure. Because of regulations and certain industries being highly regulated, you have to know what's out there. You have to know what shape it's in.
If you know your environment, the changes that are being made, know your assets, your cycles, and where things fall, you can much more readily consider yourself better at security. Do you believe that?
McKenna: It's a great plan. I think a couple of things. First of all, about leveraging compliance, PCI specifically, to make improvements for your entire security posture.
Because of regulations and certain industries being highly regulated,
you have to know what's out there. You have to know what shape it's in.
So we stepped back and considered, as a result of PCI mapped against the SANS Top 20 cyber security controls, where we made improvements. Then, we demonstrated that we made improvements in 16 of the 20 across the enterprise. So that's one point. We use compliance to help and improve the overall security posture.
As far as getting involved in other parts of the IT lifecycle, absolutely -- change management, asset management. Part of our method now for any new asset that's been introduced into production, the first question is, is this a PCI-related asset? And that requires certain controls and monitoring that we have to make sure are in place.
Los: That one question probably kicks off more security conversation than you would ever have before.
McKenna: Right, absolutely agree with you.
Gardner: I'm also looking at this larger theme of what's different now than, say, five years ago? I often hear that the types of threats are different. You mentioned the types of bad guys are different. We often hear now more about nation-states being involved rather than college students being mischievous.
I know it’s going to vary by company to company, in vertical industry by industry, but do you sense that you're dealing with a different type or higher level of sophistication when it comes to threats now, John?
Level of sophistication
McKenna: We're certainly dealing with a higher level of sophistication. We know that. We also know that there is a lot we don't know. We certainly are different from some industries. We don't see that we're necessarily a direct target of nation-states, but maybe an indirect. If we're part of a supply chain that is important, then we might still get targeted.
But my comment to that is that we've recognized the sophistication and we've recognized that we can't do this alone. So we've been very active, very involved in the industry, collaborating with other companies and even collaborating with universities.
An effort we've got underway is the Advanced Cyber Security Center, run out of Boston. It's a partnership across public and private sectors and university systems, trying to develop ways we can share intelligence, share information, and improve the overall talent-base of and knowledge base of our companies and industry.
Gardner: Raf, rising sophistication of security threats.
Los: This is something that's been building. When we started many years ago, hacking was a curiosity. It moved into a mischief. It moved into individual gains and benefits. People were showing off to their girlfriend that they hacked a website and defaced it.
There are entire cultures, entire markets, and strata of organized crime that get into this.
Those elements have not gone away, by the way, but we've moved into a totally new level of sophistication. The reason for that is that organized crime got involved. The risk is a lot higher in person than it is over the Internet. Encrypting somebody's physical hard drive and threatening to never give it back, unless they pay you, is a lot easier when there is nobody physically standing in front of you who can pull a gun on you. It's just how it is.
Over the “Internet,” there is anonymity per se. There is a certain level of perceived anonymity and it's easier to be part of those organized crimes. There are entire cultures, entire markets, and strata of organized crime that get into this. I'm not even going to touch the whole thing on activism and that whole world, because that’s an entirely different ball of wax.
But absolutely, the threat has evolved. It's going to continue to evolve. To use a statement that was made earlier this morning in a keynote by Bruce Schneier, technology is often adapted by the bad guys much faster than it is with good guys.
The bad guys look at it and say, "Ooh, how do we utilize it?" Good guys look at a car and say, "I can procure it, do an RFP, and it will take me x number of months." Bad guys say, "That’s our getaway vehicle." It’s just the way it works. It's opportunity.
Gardner: So not only more sophistication, but more types of attacks and let’s say a speedier time to risk.
Los: It’s less risk and more reward, and that’s what everybody who's “bad” wants.
Insurance approach
Gardner: I want to go out on a limb a little bit here and only because Liberty Mutual is a large and established insurance company. One of the things that I’ve been curious about in the field of security is when an insurance approach to security might arise?
For example, when fire is a hazard, we have insurance companies that come to a building and say, "We'll insure you, but you have to do x, y and z. You have to subscribe to these practices and you have to put in place this sort of infrastructure. Then, we'll come up with an insurance policy for you." Is such a thing possible with security for enterprises. Maybe you’re not the right person, John, but I am going to try.
McKenna: It’s an interesting discussion, and we had some of that discussion internally. Why aren’t we leveraging some of the practices of our actuarial departments, or risk assessors that are out there working our insurance products?
I recently met with a company that, in fact, brokers cyber insurance, and we're trying to learn from them. This is certainly not a mature product yet or mature marketplace for cyber insurance. Yet they're applying the same types of risk assessments, risk analysis, and metrics to determine exactly what a company’s vulnerabilities might be, what their risk posture might be, and exactly how to price a cyber insurance product. We're trying to learn from that.
The fact that you don’t have the metrics is one side of this. It’s very difficult to price.
Gardner: So, Raf, an interesting concept.
Los: Yeah, it is. As you were talking, I kept thinking that my life insurance company knows how much they charge me based on years and years and years and years of statistical data behind smokers, non-smokers, people who drive fast, people who are sedentary, people who workout, eat well, etc. Do we have enough data in the cyber world? I don’t think so, which means this is a really interesting game of risk.
McKenna: It’s absolutely an interesting point. The fact that you don’t have the metrics is one side of this. It’s very difficult to price. But the fact that they at least know what they should be measuring to come up with that price is part of it. You need to leverage that as a risk model and figure out what kind of assumptions you're making and what evidence can you produce to at least verify or invalidate the model.
Los: On the notion of insurance, I can just think of all the execs that have listened to that, if it’s that insurance,saying, "Great. That means we don’t have to do anything, and if something bad happens the insurance will cover it." I can just see that as a light bulb going on over somebody’s head.
Gardner: It’s not the way it’s going to work. What’s going to happen is, if you don’t do that, you won’t be able to get insurance and the companies that have insurance and that have best practices are going to win in the market. So I don’t think that’s too much of a risk, because that’s not the way any other insurance works either, right John?
McKenna: That’s exactly right, yeah.
Los: I do hope it goes that way. That’s really a good driving force though.
McKenna: Again, we're just trying to learn from it, to understand how we should be assessing our own risk posture and prioritizing where we think the security investment should be.
What's the benchmark?
Gardner: If you take lots of risks, you pay more for insurance. The only question is what you benchmark against. What is good enough? Or do you benchmark against peers and how readily will your peers share data with that insurance company? That’s a dangerous topic.
Gardner: I'll just offer one insight on that -- the log data. If you're an insurance company, you want to find out what the posture of a company is, you have access to big data analysis, and you get access to the log data, you might have a good opportunity to provide more of an empirical view on a company’s posture than they are able to do, and therefore create a value-added service. But that’s just an off-the-cuff observation.
McKenna: I think the challenge is, as Raf mentioned, whether we have the data or the evidence. We have years and years and years of history around vehicle accidents, etc. We don’t necessarily have all the correlations of data with log data and security data that would enable us to paint those historical patterns and understand them.
Most of our security decisions, whether it’s investment or risk tolerance levels, are really rooted in a business position.
Los: That’s what I’d be worried about. The causality between, if you do this, take this kind of risk, this is the likely outcome. I'm not sure we completely understand causality quite yet.
Gardner: Let’s move on to one other area before we close off, and that would be other future-of-security trends or possibility. We brought one into the fold, which is this notion of insurance, but is there anything else for you, John, that’s interesting or hopeful in terms of the future of security and risk avoidance?
McKenna: In part this may be why I was put in this position. I have less of a technical security background and more an understanding of our business and how to make business decisions. We're getting much more direct engagement of our business partners or business units in helping us to assess risk and make decisions.
That is something that we're still continuing to work on and we’ve seen some progress there, very good progress. I think we'll see even more progress, so that in fact, all of our, or most of our security decisions, whether it’s investment or risk tolerance levels, are really rooted in a business position.
Gardner: Raf, last word to you, any other concepts for you coming down of interest in terms of where this is heading?
Away from the silo
Los: Security is moving in this direction already, but I think it’s going to continue to move away from being a silo in the enterprise. It's something that is fundamental, a thread through the fabric. The notion of a stand-alone security team is definitely becoming outdated. It’s a model that does not work. We demonstrated that it does not work.
It cannot be an afterthought and all the fun clichés to go with it. What you're going to start seeing more and more of are the nontraditional security things. Those include, as I said, like I said change management, log aggregation, getting more involved into business day to day, and actually understanding.
I can't tell you how many security people I talk to that I asked the question, "So what does your company do?" And I get that brief moment of blank stare. If you can’t tell me how your company survives, stays competitive, and makes money, then really what are you doing and what are you protecting, and more importantly, why?
That’s going to continue to evolve, it’s just going to separate the really good folks, like John, that get it from those who are simply pushing buttons and hoping for the best.
Security is moving in this direction already, but I think it’s going to
continue to move away from being a silo in the enterprise.
Gardner: I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there, and with that let me please thank our co-host, Rafal Los, the Chief Security Evangelist at HP Software. Thank you so much.
Los: Thanks for having me again.
Gardner: And I’d also like to thank our supporter for this series, HP Software and remind our audience to carry on the dialogue with Raf through his blog and also the Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn.
I’d also like to extend a huge thank you to our special guest, John McKenna, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for Liberty Mutual. Thanks so much, John.
McKenna: Thank you. This was fun, enjoyed it.
Gardner: And you all can gain more insights and information on the best of IT performance management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance. And you can also always access this another episode in our HP Discover Performance podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your co-host and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT Innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how insurance company Liberty Mutual has adopted a new, heightened security posture that permeates the development process. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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