Information Security

Many of the talks at the FIRST conference consider activities within and between incident response teams, but two talks today considered how CSIRTs and boards can work better together. Pete O’Dell suggested that many company boards either delegate or ignore information security, perhaps considering that it is “just another risk”.

A strong common (and unplanned, honest!) theme emerged from the information security session at Networkshop yesterday: that information security, or information risk, is ultimately the responsibility of individual users. Only they can decide which documents it is safe to read on a train, which phone calls they can make in a public place.

Presenting at the Jisc’s Safer Internet Day event got me thinking a bit more about the shared interests between owners and organisations in a BYOD scheme, and the opportunity that might present. For many years I’ve liked the idea of helping users be safe in their personal Internet lives (where motivation should be a matter of self-interest, rather than "having to comply with policy") and improving workplace safety as a side-effect.