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We need a certification org like ISO to look into the practices of any data storing web service. Until recently we neglected it because the outsiders thought th

We need a certification org like ISO to look into the practices of any data storing web service. Until recently we neglected it because the outsiders thought that it is straightforward to do so, but time after time we see ridiculous mistakes exposing sensitive data & passwords. This has to end yesterday. It is fine to fall victim of an elaborate hacking attack and lose customer data, it is not fine to not even follow a bare minimum of practices to protect their data.

henryfjordan 6y ago
I would like to see a Professional Personal Data Engineer license similar to becoming a PE in other engineering fields that would specifically qualify an engineer to build systems that contain PII. Then if you have a data breach you can investigate and potentially pull the license and assign personal liability similar to if a bridge fell over.
- MrQuimico 6y ago
  Something like Europe's GDPR should be enough. And of course product certifications.
  - henryfjordan 6y ago
    I disagree. The GDPR and CCPA only have teeth against corporations. You will lose some money but nobody is going to jail over a GDPR violation. The investors will be sad but they aren't even really responsible, the employees who built the data-systems are. At the same time, you can ruin someone's life through a data-breach. Imagine you are on one of these dating apps and your boss takes a gander at the leaks and fires you because of your private life. Or worse, some bigots show up at your house and burn a cross in your yard. So how do we fix a situation where the person responsible for securing your data has no skin in the game? Put their head on the block. Other engineering disciplines hold the PE liable for mistakes because they recognize the stakes involved. I think that assigning liability is absolutely appropriate for building systems with PII. Product certifications would be great too, although that would be done by a PE so you'd kill two birds with one stone by licensing Data Engineers.
    - MrQuimico 6y ago
      How do you enforce that when the service is provided by a company in another country? GDPR solves that because if you want to do business with European citizens you must comply with it no matter where you are. GDPR is not only about the fines, it stablishes protocols to communicate breaches, makes somebody responsible for it (the DPO) and makes distinctions between the different types of data and the requirements to handle it. Also, enforcing GDPR is no joke, and we are still learning its consequences (http://www.london-registrars.co.uk/first-prison-sentence-arising-from-the-gdpr-should-remind-firms-of-their-responsibilities/ http://www.london-registrars.co.uk/first-prison-sentence-ari...). As I see it, Licensed Data Engineers won't make companies more careful with our data, since all they need to do is to sue them and fire them when there is a problem. We need laws that make data hard to use, so companies will only ask for what they really need, will use the data with a purpose and will store it only while it's useful. Software is more similar to a car than it is to a bridge. Companies build and sell them all over the world. Cars are certified at each country as needed, but it doesn't matter who is building them, as long as they meet all the requirements. Software should be similar.
      - henryfjordan 6y ago
        I didn't realize the gdpr had such teeth. I was wrong, the gdpr will help solve data breaches.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      > So how do we fix a situation where the person responsible for securing your data has no skin in the game? Put their head on the block. This implies there is a perfect scenario of security, but even the best security experts can still have breaches, it's unfair to punish people acting in good faith.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  I've seen this comparison a lot and on some level I agree with the idea, but I don't think the comparison is actually that applicable. This big difference is that this isn't just "the bridge fell over". In the case of a cyber attack, it's more like "a terrorist detonated a bomb on the bridge and blew it up". And in such a case, I think it would be a pretty big stretch to blame the engineer who designed the bridge.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    There's a scale, here. "Somone crashed into the bridge support pillar in the median and the bridge fell down" sounds like the fault of the engineer. "A foreign nation sent a fighter jet" doesn't. I don't have any ideas on how to have a reasonable standard of "this is the sort of attack you shouldn't fall to," though. How do you keep this from being years outdated very quickly?
  - henryfjordan 6y ago
    I agree that if a nation-state breaks into your system with a 0-day exploit, that's very very different than leaving your S3 bucket set to public. I'm not suggesting that every data breach results in jail time, just like not every bridge collapse results in jail time either. There should be an investigation that determines the cause and whether that cause was foreseeable. The other engineering disciplines seem to have it adequately figured out, software isn't that different. I also don't think you should be facing life or anything, maybe something as small as a fine would work. Ultimately the data breaches will continue to happen as long as the personal incentives of the people building data systems aren't aligned with the users, and the GDPR does nothing to address that.
lhdj 6y ago
Data privacy is an engineering problem - and currently there aren't any really good open-source tools to 'solve' data privacy - it's really up to the application developer to make sure they don't mess up. If the organisations is sufficiently large there is a CISO to ensure the correct processes are in place so that this sort of thing does not happen. I think in an ideal world data privacy should be addressed by open-source software enabling software developers to easily express data privacy as code and version control it and review it much like we do with our infrastructure. There is an product [0] which is currently in Alpha aimed at doing this. (Full disclosure I am one of the core devs) We don't support S3 buckets yet - but it's on the roadmap. [0] https://github.com/openquery-io/parallax https://github.com/openquery-io/parallax
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > aren't any really good open-source tools to 'solve' data privacy The most exciting project I've found so far, who are working on this, is a project called Ceptr, who have open sourced a pattern called Holographic chain. It uses validation rules and open app logic to create completely distributed apps. Each user holds onto their own data. It is often called Protocol Cooperativism (close to Platform Cooperativism) You can find more about it in this medium post by one of the core contributors: "It's a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications." [1] [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
txcwpalpha 6y ago
That exists, and it's already part of ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27001 It's toothless, though. Due to the nature of security moving so quickly, any certification or audit standard that actually prescribes specific security controls is inherently going to take so long to get approved by the standards organization that by the time it gets approved, it's already outdated. The "fix" that has been attempted for this is to try and write security standards that are high level (read: vague) so that they have more "shelf life", but the result of that is that nearly anyone can pass the audit/certification because the requirements are so vague. See: NIST CSF, ISO 27001, HIPAA...
- bawolff 6y ago
  The problem here doesn't seem to be require a specific security control, so much as "have access control". Any access control. And test that it works.
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    I've worked on a couple of these NIST or ISO 27001 assessments and I would bet that even this company would meet some standard of "have access control". The audit/certification often won't care that the access control you have is "the bucket allows public access", it's still an access control! For that matter, it's entirely possible they had security testing "controls" too. But again, the audit/certification probably won't even care that the security testing team is one guy who sometimes tests the app login every couple of weeks. "Oh, Jim tested to make sure that the app only allows 3 password attempts? Security Testing: Check!" Don't get me wrong, the ISO/NIST frameworks are absolutely a good thing. For a lot of my work, they've been my bible. They are fantastic guides to help companies who want to be more secure focus their efforts and understand how they measure up. But that's only for companies that really want to be more secure. For all of the companies out there that just want to check a checkbox or pass an audit, these frameworks are way way too easy to give a "false positive".
  - t0mas88 6y ago
    The thing that ISO helps with is not so much requiring "must have access control", but much more the fact that it requires having specific people responsible for security and having processes to monitor and continuously improve the security practices. It's often frowned upon by engineers, because it's much more about processes and management structure than anything technical. But I've been involved in a few organizations that went from "technically good but unmanaged" to ISO certified. And I'm quite sure all of them got more secure and did more in terms of continuous improvement after certification.
znpy 6y ago
the computer and software is what it is (specifically: non-existent entry barrier, possibility of exponential customer base growth) also because there is little to no regulation about operating practices. i'm not saying this is good or bad just... keep that in mind. careful what you wish for.
hyperman1 6y ago
Don't take ISO. Let the market sort it out, after the governement provides the right incentives, and maybe provides some minimal baseline. For example, the gov gives huge fines, and pierces the corporate veil. Then insurers insure the risks for a data breach. They calculate the expensive premium, and lower it if you do what the consider the right thing, e.g. some ISO guidelines. Now incentives are aligned: Corporations secure their infra to avoid expensive premiums. Insurers give correct security guidance. If they overbear, they lose customers. If they are too lax, they pay huge insurance claims. The governement's job is to make sure nobody is asleep at thehelm. After a while, make the insurance mandatory. Basically, it's what works for fire insurance.
- jrace 6y ago
  But that is how it already works, Equifax was fined $700,000,000 - very little of which goes to the people actually affected, and EFX is still operating as strong as ever. There are data-breach insurers already. Again, that has not changed anything.
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    That's why the government should punish more harshly. They should be sending the message: Stop this behaviour. The Equifax message was more like: Carry on, it's worth the risk.
thefounder 6y ago
Yeah, that's exactly what we need. Another PCI-DSS certification crap. What people don't understand is that their data is not private unless it's e2e encrypted. Most of the financial apps/websites have been bandly hacked and they have all the certificates in the world.
mc32 6y ago
I hate to agree because it means more sclerotic regulation that gets ossified and at some point forgets the main aim it was put in place for... but we see that without that burdensome oversight people aren’t doing the right thing. It’s like we need an FDA for data.

henryfjordan 6y ago

I would like to see a Professional Personal Data Engineer license similar to becoming a PE in other engineering fields that would specifically qualify an engineer to build systems that contain PII. Then if you have a data breach you can investigate and potentially pull the license and assign personal liability similar to if a bridge fell over.

MrQuimico 6y ago
Something like Europe's GDPR should be enough. And of course product certifications.
- henryfjordan 6y ago
  I disagree. The GDPR and CCPA only have teeth against corporations. You will lose some money but nobody is going to jail over a GDPR violation. The investors will be sad but they aren't even really responsible, the employees who built the data-systems are. At the same time, you can ruin someone's life through a data-breach. Imagine you are on one of these dating apps and your boss takes a gander at the leaks and fires you because of your private life. Or worse, some bigots show up at your house and burn a cross in your yard. So how do we fix a situation where the person responsible for securing your data has no skin in the game? Put their head on the block. Other engineering disciplines hold the PE liable for mistakes because they recognize the stakes involved. I think that assigning liability is absolutely appropriate for building systems with PII. Product certifications would be great too, although that would be done by a PE so you'd kill two birds with one stone by licensing Data Engineers.
  - MrQuimico 6y ago
    How do you enforce that when the service is provided by a company in another country? GDPR solves that because if you want to do business with European citizens you must comply with it no matter where you are. GDPR is not only about the fines, it stablishes protocols to communicate breaches, makes somebody responsible for it (the DPO) and makes distinctions between the different types of data and the requirements to handle it. Also, enforcing GDPR is no joke, and we are still learning its consequences (http://www.london-registrars.co.uk/first-prison-sentence-arising-from-the-gdpr-should-remind-firms-of-their-responsibilities/ http://www.london-registrars.co.uk/first-prison-sentence-ari...). As I see it, Licensed Data Engineers won't make companies more careful with our data, since all they need to do is to sue them and fire them when there is a problem. We need laws that make data hard to use, so companies will only ask for what they really need, will use the data with a purpose and will store it only while it's useful. Software is more similar to a car than it is to a bridge. Companies build and sell them all over the world. Cars are certified at each country as needed, but it doesn't matter who is building them, as long as they meet all the requirements. Software should be similar.
    - henryfjordan 6y ago
      I didn't realize the gdpr had such teeth. I was wrong, the gdpr will help solve data breaches.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    > So how do we fix a situation where the person responsible for securing your data has no skin in the game? Put their head on the block. This implies there is a perfect scenario of security, but even the best security experts can still have breaches, it's unfair to punish people acting in good faith.
txcwpalpha 6y ago
I've seen this comparison a lot and on some level I agree with the idea, but I don't think the comparison is actually that applicable. This big difference is that this isn't just "the bridge fell over". In the case of a cyber attack, it's more like "a terrorist detonated a bomb on the bridge and blew it up". And in such a case, I think it would be a pretty big stretch to blame the engineer who designed the bridge.
- majormajor 6y ago
  There's a scale, here. "Somone crashed into the bridge support pillar in the median and the bridge fell down" sounds like the fault of the engineer. "A foreign nation sent a fighter jet" doesn't. I don't have any ideas on how to have a reasonable standard of "this is the sort of attack you shouldn't fall to," though. How do you keep this from being years outdated very quickly?
- henryfjordan 6y ago
  I agree that if a nation-state breaks into your system with a 0-day exploit, that's very very different than leaving your S3 bucket set to public. I'm not suggesting that every data breach results in jail time, just like not every bridge collapse results in jail time either. There should be an investigation that determines the cause and whether that cause was foreseeable. The other engineering disciplines seem to have it adequately figured out, software isn't that different. I also don't think you should be facing life or anything, maybe something as small as a fine would work. Ultimately the data breaches will continue to happen as long as the personal incentives of the people building data systems aren't aligned with the users, and the GDPR does nothing to address that.

lhdj 6y ago

Data privacy is an engineering problem - and currently there aren't any really good open-source tools to 'solve' data privacy - it's really up to the application developer to make sure they don't mess up. If the organisations is sufficiently large there is a CISO to ensure the correct processes are in place so that this sort of thing does not happen. I think in an ideal world data privacy should be addressed by open-source software enabling software developers to easily express data privacy as code and version control it and review it much like we do with our infrastructure. There is an product [0] which is currently in Alpha aimed at doing this. (Full disclosure I am one of the core devs) We don't support S3 buckets yet - but it's on the roadmap. [0] https://github.com/openquery-io/parallax https://github.com/openquery-io/parallax

bergstromm466 6y ago
> aren't any really good open-source tools to 'solve' data privacy The most exciting project I've found so far, who are working on this, is a project called Ceptr, who have open sourced a pattern called Holographic chain. It uses validation rules and open app logic to create completely distributed apps. Each user holds onto their own data. It is often called Protocol Cooperativism (close to Platform Cooperativism) You can find more about it in this medium post by one of the core contributors: "It's a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications." [1] [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

txcwpalpha 6y ago

That exists, and it's already part of ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27001 It's toothless, though. Due to the nature of security moving so quickly, any certification or audit standard that actually prescribes specific security controls is inherently going to take so long to get approved by the standards organization that by the time it gets approved, it's already outdated. The "fix" that has been attempted for this is to try and write security standards that are high level (read: vague) so that they have more "shelf life", but the result of that is that nearly anyone can pass the audit/certification because the requirements are so vague. See: NIST CSF, ISO 27001, HIPAA...

bawolff 6y ago
The problem here doesn't seem to be require a specific security control, so much as "have access control". Any access control. And test that it works.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  I've worked on a couple of these NIST or ISO 27001 assessments and I would bet that even this company would meet some standard of "have access control". The audit/certification often won't care that the access control you have is "the bucket allows public access", it's still an access control! For that matter, it's entirely possible they had security testing "controls" too. But again, the audit/certification probably won't even care that the security testing team is one guy who sometimes tests the app login every couple of weeks. "Oh, Jim tested to make sure that the app only allows 3 password attempts? Security Testing: Check!" Don't get me wrong, the ISO/NIST frameworks are absolutely a good thing. For a lot of my work, they've been my bible. They are fantastic guides to help companies who want to be more secure focus their efforts and understand how they measure up. But that's only for companies that really want to be more secure. For all of the companies out there that just want to check a checkbox or pass an audit, these frameworks are way way too easy to give a "false positive".
- t0mas88 6y ago
  The thing that ISO helps with is not so much requiring "must have access control", but much more the fact that it requires having specific people responsible for security and having processes to monitor and continuously improve the security practices. It's often frowned upon by engineers, because it's much more about processes and management structure than anything technical. But I've been involved in a few organizations that went from "technically good but unmanaged" to ISO certified. And I'm quite sure all of them got more secure and did more in terms of continuous improvement after certification.

znpy 6y ago

the computer and software is what it is (specifically: non-existent entry barrier, possibility of exponential customer base growth) also because there is little to no regulation about operating practices. i'm not saying this is good or bad just... keep that in mind. careful what you wish for.

hyperman1 6y ago

Don't take ISO. Let the market sort it out, after the governement provides the right incentives, and maybe provides some minimal baseline. For example, the gov gives huge fines, and pierces the corporate veil. Then insurers insure the risks for a data breach. They calculate the expensive premium, and lower it if you do what the consider the right thing, e.g. some ISO guidelines. Now incentives are aligned: Corporations secure their infra to avoid expensive premiums. Insurers give correct security guidance. If they overbear, they lose customers. If they are too lax, they pay huge insurance claims. The governement's job is to make sure nobody is asleep at thehelm. After a while, make the insurance mandatory. Basically, it's what works for fire insurance.

jrace 6y ago
But that is how it already works, Equifax was fined $700,000,000 - very little of which goes to the people actually affected, and EFX is still operating as strong as ever. There are data-breach insurers already. Again, that has not changed anything.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  That's why the government should punish more harshly. They should be sending the message: Stop this behaviour. The Equifax message was more like: Carry on, it's worth the risk.

thefounder 6y ago

Yeah, that's exactly what we need. Another PCI-DSS certification crap. What people don't understand is that their data is not private unless it's e2e encrypted. Most of the financial apps/websites have been bandly hacked and they have all the certificates in the world.

mc32 6y ago

I hate to agree because it means more sclerotic regulation that gets ossified and at some point forgets the main aim it was put in place for... but we see that without that burdensome oversight people aren’t doing the right thing. It’s like we need an FDA for data.