IT Compliance and Controls

As one may expect, given massive amounts of defaults, bad lending practices, nonexistent risk management departments, and essentially a complete lack of due diligence is there any expectation that fraud did not occur?  One of many to be coming to light is that of AIG.  According to recent findings AIG hid financial distresses and practices […]

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A nice article posted at eWeek on Risk Based IT Compliance Self Assessments is linked below.  It is a great primer to give any business a nice starting place.  A few additions I would add are the following points (note I am using the articles numbering so it is easy to see where my additions […]

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In the Wall Street Journal and on several online resources there is documented evidence that an information attack was launched against the country of Georgia and its government systems.  This attack coincided with the Russian offensive.  The implications of this attack are tremendous and shift the theory beyond information cyberwarfare to practical lessons.  A few […]

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A recent article raised the point that SOX expense by companies was declining (as it should with the full adoption of AS5 across all filers and it being in place for over 6 years!), and that according to analysts that Governance expenses were on the rise and the new focus of enterprises.  Yes and not […]

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On Sunday a foreign government enforced its sovereign right to censor its citizens, and consequently caused a global outage (2 hours) to the most popular video side in the planet, run by the most sophisticated global internet company - Google.  The lessons here resonate with the need for organizations to consider all aspects of risk […]

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Yesterday I highlighted that organizations must consider the value of information based on the party that possesses it, i.e. If the information was made available to anyone - what could they do and how bad would the impact be to your organization?
Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article entitled “Another Liechtenstein Bank Suffers Theft of […]

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Intellectual property for an organization can vary between trade secrets (i.e. the ’secret sauce recipe’) and customer specific data.  Every organization must classify information appropriately based on their own usage of the data, governing laws, and best practices.  Two recent examples caught my attention as examples where data was compromised and the affects.
The first is […]

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The criticality of the Internet has grown exponentially. Consumers rely on Internet based applications (or RIA) for everything from email, CRM, ERP, publishing - and this online portal. Businesses have generally transitioned from dedicated frame relays, and leased lines to VPN tunnels through the Internet (link to Cisco Whitepaper). The efficiency gained […]

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Remediation and corrective action are part of the lessons learned when a negative event (security breach, fraud, etc…) occurs within an organization.  It is regarded as best practice to learn from one’s own mistakes, and an even better practice to learn from OTHER’s mistakes.  In either case understanding what controls may address the situation on […]

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A constant challenge for organizations is measuring the potential impact and consequences of mandated regulations. The weighting of compliance initiatives based on such consequences is not best practice, but is common. The need to demonstrate a true cost benefit analysis is dependent upon, in part, to the actual follow through and enforcement of […]

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