“If our country is to successfully defend our right to live the American way, it needs every one of you, and requires you in the best possible condition. Any [company] who willfully, or through neglect fails to maintain [their systems] in this condition is a ‘shirker’ who is throwing an extra burden on his comrades by requiring them to do his work as well as their own.”

It’s kind of apropos how easily you can adapt this introduction to a 1940s War Department venereal disease training film into a lesson addressing the 21^st Century problems of cyberattacks and malware.  After all, certain computer attacks are called “virus” for a reason, businesses often find themselves in a virtual “war” with hackers and nation states on digital shores all around the world, and, perhaps most telling, the sordid details of both are things we really don’t like to discuss in “open and polite society.”  (I’ll stop there so as not to offend, but the list can go on.) So it comes as no surprise that it is the Department of Defense that is pulling back the curtain to openly address cyber-hygiene and, with the recent update and “open release” of the DoD Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan, providing federal contractors and commercial companies alike with insight on the computer security prophylactics the Department is directing its units use.

While the DoD has been vocal about its expectations regarding the protection and control of its data, the newly accessible plan is particularly helpful because it addresses “tactical-level” compliance, meaning those elements further down the chain away from the “enterprise” of the larger Department. The effort is intended to dovetail into the Department’s cyber “scorecard,” a still-evolving device intended to help DoD officials remain apprised of weapons system and computer network vulnerabilities, as well as to provide visibility on how data are moving around the Department’s various agencies. In this regard, the implementation plan focuses DoD elements on four “lines of effort”:

• Strong authentication to degrade the adversaries’ ability to maneuver on DoD information networks;
• Device hardening to reduce internal and external attack vectors into DoD information networks;
• Reduction of attack surface to reduce external attack vectors into DoD information networks; and
• Alignment to cybersecurity/computer network defense service providers to improve detection of and response to adversary activity.

The DoD’s implementation plan is helpful in that it is directed at “commanders and supervisors,” not technology-savvy CIOs or CISOs. Accordingly, it provides a succinct framework that allows commercial commanders and supervisors to be more cyber-conversant on the threats their organizations face and the defenses of which they need to be aware.  Here are some details and a few questions that will assist in any awkward dialogue that the subject may spur:

• Strong Authentication. This means that your company should be taking measures that reduce anonymity among its information systems to prevent unauthorized users from gaining authorized access to a system or environment, including wide-scale network compromise by impersonating privileged administrators (see, e.g., Edward Snowden). Employing strong authentication measures makes it more difficult for anyone other than the legitimate credential holder to utilize those credentials to access the respective systems or environments. Furthermore, your company should know who has access to what and why. If an employee, VP, or board member does not need access, or no longer needs access to, specific data, do not give it to them. And this goes up and down the chain. It’s not personal, it’s safe; by cutting off paths to critical data, malware that inadvertently finds its way on to systems (i.e. via phishing) could be contained and limit the overall damage that might otherwise occur. The key here is to ensure your organization is protecting not only high-value assets, such as servers and routers, but also system access

Questions to ask/Things to know:

• What is/are our most valuable data resource/resources?
• Where does it reside in our data architecture?
• Who has logical (e.g. computer) access to that resource? Why?
• Who has physical access to that resource? Why?
• How often do we audit logical/physical access to that resource?
• How quickly do we remove those that do not need logical access to that resource?
• What specialized training are we providing for people with access to that resource

• Device Hardening. By ensuring company systems are properly “hardened,” a company can decrease the cost and impact of a successful exploitation by an adversary. This means that an organization should take affirmative steps to properly configure its systems, as well as to detect and correct exploitable weaknesses in software or hardware. By removing obsolete systems from networks and keeping firewall, intrusion detection, and virus software all up to date and capable of receiving updates and patches, a company can help “harden” its systems. This step is especially important when a company is building or revamping its internal systems.

Questions to ask/Things to know:

• Who is in charge of data security and is your compliance program involved?
• Is the Information Security Officer subordinate to, or a contemporary of, the IT manager?
• Do we schedule our patches or updates or do they happen “live”?
• How will these new cybersecurity “gizmos,” “gadgets,” and “bring your own devices” align with our current infrastructure? Will their introduction introduce any weaknesses with our current systems?
• How will we need to update our Data and Information Security (“DaIS”) plan with the inclusion of these new systems?