In Depth

Five Mistakes Security Pros Would Make Again

Whether it's getting fired for standing up for what's right or making a network configuration mistake that leads to better security, there are some mistakes worth making. Five security pros offer personal examples.

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

Page 2

2. STICKING A SOX IN IT
Mistake maker: Anonymous
Position: Director of information security
Location: Northwestern U.S.
The incident: Botched initial Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance initiative

"In year one of SOX, we had outlined a compliance plan and set of controls that we thought would meet the requirements. Of course, in year one, every company was making educated guesses about what their auditors would require. Because of the timing of our fiscal year, we were among the first companies to have to comply, so we had very little concrete information from other companies.

"When our auditors showed up several months before year's end, they delivered some very bad news: We had gotten it all wrong. Our controls would not meet their minimum requirements. We had to start over with only a few months to implement and test our entire SOX compliance plan and most of our controls. This was a task that had taken many companies two years to complete.

"We dropped everything, rallied the entire organization, and put in place an extremely lean and effective set of SOX controls. Not only did we pass, our auditors later said that our program was among the best and most efficient they had seen.

"While other companies built massive and complex SOX compliance programs that they would spend the next few years trying to pare down, we had built a minimalist program from the beginning out of absolute necessity. We simply did not have time to over-engineer the SOX program, so we focused on meeting the minimum requirements.

"Our error in the initial design of our SOX program and subsequent focused and hurried redesign resulted in an industry-leading program that was later praised by peers at much larger companies who had spent many times more on their programs."

3. CRASHING THE FIREWALL
Mistake maker: Christine Wanta
Position: CSO at IntraISP, a Clearwire company
Location: Greater St. Louis area
The incident: Suffered a firewall crash and had to rebuild rulebase from scratch

"I had a firewall rulebase crash on me while I was in it, and since I was the one in the rulebase I had to fix the situation. We did have a strong backup procedure prior to any changes, but I either did not create the backup or screwed it up or was being taught a lesson from one of my fellow admins. I don't recall.

"I had to rebuild the rulebase from scratch basically using a not-so-friendly output of a backup, going through the rulebase change requests and basically cleaning the rulebase up as I went.