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Roger Halbheer

Job title:
Chief security advisor, Microsoft

Areas of expertise:
Policy, architecture, law enforcement, cybersecurity, processes

Biography:
Roger Halbheer joined Microsoft as Chief Security Advisor of Microsoft Switzerland in 2001 and was promoted to the role of Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in February 2007. Roger leads a team of national Chief Security Advisors across EMEA who work with organizations in the commercial and public sectors - including national governments, law enforcement and intelligence agencies - on information technology issues and strategies. He is a trusted advisor to C-level executives, governments and law enforcement agencies and has established relationships with security communities and government agencies across the region. Roger is a regular speaker at industry events and has worked with national and international print and broadcast media both to represent Microsoft and to provide expert comment on broader security issues. A Swiss national, Roger holds a Master of Computer Science degree from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and is a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP). Before joining Microsoft, he was responsible for e-Business Risk Management at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Switzerland. He lives in Zurich and is married with two sons.

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Implementing the Top 4 Defense Strategies

The Australian Defense Signals Directorate maintains a list of the Top 35 Mitigation Strategies against targeted intrusions. This is just a reference to the top strategies:

  1. Patch Applications
  2. Patch the Operating System
  3. Minimize the use of local admin
  4. Application whitelisting

Looking at these 35 strategies, the DSD claims that:

While no single strategy can prevent this type of malicious activity, the effectiveness of implementing the top four strategies remains unchanged. Implemented as a package, these strategies would have prevented at least 70% of the intrusions that DSD analysed and responded to in 2009, and at least 85% of the intrusions responded to in 2010.

This is pretty much in line with the anecdotal reference I could make where we see successful attacks either coming in through unpatched systems (point 1 and 2), flaws in applications developed in-house (kind of point 2) and social engineering (point 3 and 4). However, these things are not that new, aren’t they? We are talking about patch management since a long time – and patch management not only for the Microsoft environment but the all the applications, being it Microsoft, Adobe, in-house Apps as well as Open Source operating systems.

The DSD even went a step further and developed a really good paper called Implementing DSD’s Top Four for Windows Environments. Something definitely worth reading!

Roger

Posted 13/12/2011 by Roger Halbheer

Tagged under:Patch Management,Security Processes

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