Blog

From time to time, cyberwarfare surfaces on the ocean of the useless Italian political and sub-political talks.

Last week, waiting my turn to talk in a conference, I’ve heard a speaker claiming to “knows best” ? that said that in five year Italy will have its set of actual guidelines to enforce ENISA standards, advocating a stronger tie between industries and a government committee on critical infrastructure and all the usual vaporware that comes with the topic.

I stayed speechless while losing the count of the times that – in about 27 years on the field – I’ve heard such kind of nonsenses. These people care about the colour of the windows’ curtains while there a house still to be built. They think in term of “national committee”, “global report”, “breach notification” while they still have to succeed in convincing people in not leaving passwords on a monitor-stuck post-it. This reminds me a sketch from “I Maniaci“, an Italian movie from the Sixties, where His Excellence Micozzi, ministry of defense (actor Raimondo Vianello) alwyas followed the journalists questions’ by saying “we shall appoint a committee to look further into the matter”, even the day he was cautioned for alleged wrongdoing.

While the movie was supposed to by a comedy, seeing it today doesn’t elicit a laugh. The security issue ? is serious because, when the Echelon scandal exploded, we could claim that it was a relative threat to Italy since our communication infrastructure and our reliance upon were from stone-age. But now things have changed enough to allow an attack(er) to actually endanger Italy as a country. And I can’t stop thinking of ? the Italian approach being like a politburo of some (former) Eastern Block country, talking about Marxist orthodoxy while people in the squares was taking down Lenin’s statues.

We shall appoint a committee to look further into the matter.

No, I didn’t do a mistake. I actually meant that security is product and not – as the mantra we hear since decades – a process. Truth is that company departments are governed by this god called “budget” and failing to fully spend it means that at the next round the financial controller will bash it, thus lowering the status and the power of the involved IT or security manager.

So monies have to be spent but how? Not on consulting or security management, of course. When incidents happen (as they do, more often that we may imagine or hope) the barrel starts rolling and everybody in the company keep it rolling on somebody else’s shoulders. And here comes the catch: nobody will ever be fired for having purchased stacks of “security-branded” boxes like firewalls, intrusion detections tools etc. even if these boxes aren’t properly deployed.

It’s easy to address the incident meeting with the CEO, the HR head and the legals by saying: “look, we purchased the best things on the market, and to be sure that we were safe, we doubled all the components – you know, redundancy, high-availability and those other things required by our security certification. Unfortunately these fucking balcanian hackers know better then the devil itself. But I have already managed how to fix the problem: our supplier has been asked to provide its latest device that will protect us better than ever. BTW, since we’re talking about that, though I got a fair price cut, the thing is costly and I need my budget to be extended. Is for security sake!”

Now compare this statement with what follows: “well, as you know, we didn’t need to spend money on hardware. Our firewalls are still capable and fit, so I focused on the internal checks. I hired a consulting firm to do penetration test once-a-year (can’t do it more often because the company complained that these activities slow down the business), than I had another company to monitor and analyze the daily flow of the traffic we generate (but we have been prevented by the legals to dive much too deep into the origin of the connections, so we don’t actually know where did the trojan come from), I then hired an auditor to check the software installed on each computer in use, but the HR told us that we couldn’t do it on the high level management laptop.”

And here comes the final question: which one security manager is gonna be fired?