By Ash Patel, Marketing Specialist. Recently we reached out to John Linford, Security & OTTF Forum Director, for The Open Group, to discuss his role, industry advice, updates within his Forum and lots more. Thank you again to John for his time and for giving us an expansive look into his Forum at large. Please see the full interview below:
By Ash Patel – Marketing Specialist, The Open Group
Recently we reached out to Joanne Woytek (Program Director for the NASA SEWP Program), to discuss her role as a Governing Customer Member Representative for The Open Group Governing Board.
In late July, The Open Group hosted an event bringing together speakers and practitioners from around the world to meet in Washington, DC at the historical Mayflower Hotel, and discuss some of today’s most vital topics in the area of security and resiliency.
With a focus on Zero Trust Architecture and Supply Chain Security, leaders from businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Micro Focus, and ServiceNow joined experts from public sector organizations like NIST and NASA, together with representatives from The Open Group itself, to explore how open standards are driving important developments and actionable insights in these important and developing topics.
By Jim Hietala, VP of Security and Business Development, The Open Group and John Linford, Forum Director, Security and Open Trusted Technology Forums, The Open Group.
Open FAIR has seen rapid and extensive adoption in the US, where it has become the defacto standard for quantifying cybersecurity risk. We at The Open Group are encouraged that Open FAIR awareness and adoption are also increasing globally, and we’ve also seen some increased usage outside of the traditional IT risk quantification area. Some interesting recent developments on increased Open FAIR use and adoption outside of the US, and outside of the IT area include:
On May 12, 2021, President Joe Biden issued the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. This EO enumerates that “…the prevention, detection, assessment, and remediation of cyber incidents is a top priority and essential to national and economic security.” The EO contains a significant level of detail regarding areas of improvement for federal IT systems, as well as policy responses to be implemented by the government in support of greater security for private and public IT systems. The EO mentions in some detail the shift to zero trust security as a part of what is needed to combat cyber threats, as well as increased reliance on enhanced supply chain security.
By Jim Hietala (VP, BD and Security), Andras Szakal (VP and CTO), John Linford Security and OTTF Forum Director) – The Open Group
In potentially the most damaging cyber-supply chain attack ever, a leading IT systems management vendor became the latest hi-tech company to suffer a major cybersecurity breach with wide-reaching consequences. The malware that caused the attack has been dubbed SUNBURST by Microsoft and code-named Solorigate by FireEye, the security consulting firm that uncovered the breach after falling victim to it late last year.
After successfully infiltrating the development environment, attackers were able to observe and learn how to subvert the vendor’s development and operations pipeline. Hackers were then able to maliciously taint the vendor’s product by planting a sophisticated trojan. Once the software, which required broad systems access, was installed in customers’ environments, the attackers were able to leverage the tainted software to exfiltrate sensitive information from within an organization’s network.
