Category: Security Architecture

The Open Group Event Highlights – July 25-27, 2022 – Washington DC

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.

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The Open Group Zero Trust Initiative and The President’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity

The Open Group, an international vendor- and technology-neutral standards and certification consortium, has been actively engaged in establishing a consistent and coherent vision of Zero Trust and Zero Trust Architecture across industry, academia, and governmental organizations for the last two years. In fact, The Open Group pioneered the underlying principles behind Zero Trust, under the aegis of the Jericho Forum® and the guidance that came from the Jericho Forum over the past two decades, including the Jericho Forum Commandments and Jericho Forum Identity Commandments.

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A Shared Language for Supply Chain Security

In the world of technology, there are paradigms of language that arise organically and artificially over time. Necessity requires a shared mode of communication for ideas and as a result, descriptors, nouns, and technical designators are created and shared. The problem arises when certain words acquire a surfeit of meaning, so much so that they paradoxically become less meaningful. There are many examples of this but for our purposes, we’re going to look at “Supply Chain Security”.

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Solorigate: A case study for why supply chain security is critical for governments and businesses

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.

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Updates to the Open FAIR™ Body of Knowledge, Part 3

The Open Group Security Forum is thrilled to announce the publication of an update to the Open FAIR™ Body of Knowledge (BoK). The Open FAIR BoK is comprised of The Open Group Risk Taxonomy (O-RT) Standard and The Open Group Risk Analysis (O-RA) Standard. The Open Group initiated a standards effort regarding FAIR ~10 years ago, and these standards define the official, open, vendor-neutral and consensus-developed definition of FAIR.

This blog post is the third of three in a series to describe updates to the Open FAIR™ Body of Knowledge. It will describe specific updates to O-RT to bring it to Version 3.0. The first post described revisions made to both O-RA and O-RT for consistency between the documents; the second post described specific updates to O-RA to bring it to Version 2.0.

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The Open Group at “Experience IT NM”

On November 4 and 5, 2020, the New Mexico Technology Council is hosting its virtual event entitled Experience IT NM. The New Mexico Technology Council a member-driven association of businesses, organizations, and tech professionals working together to promote the growth and success of New Mexico’s technology business sectors. Its members include a diverse mix of New Mexico companies, cities, and universities and colleges.

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The Open Group ‘Digital-First’ Virtual July Event – Highlights Blog

As an organization that is known for its world-class events and prides itself on bringing people together globally, this week The Open Group hosted its second virtual event following the success of the first ever #ogVIRTUAL in April.

It was fantastic to have over 2,100 attendees from 107 countries come together virtually to explore the topic of ‘Digital First’. Sessions and workshops were hosted by a plethora of industry experts and centered on the security, trust, and architectural issues which need to be considered when becoming a “Digital-First” organization.

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The Open Group to Hold “Digital-First” Event Virtually July 20-23, 2020

The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology standards consortium, is hosting its upcoming “Digital-First” event virtually on July 20 – 23, 2020. The Open Group Digital-First July 2020 will bring together vendors and end-user organizations from across the globe to explore how they can make the radical, fundamental change towards becoming a digital enterprise – a topic that has never been more pertinent as business and technology leaders face the challenge of surviving and thriving in the ‘new normal’.

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Introducing The Open Group Open FAIR™ Risk Analysis Tool

Since late in 2016, The Open Group Security Forum have been collaborating with San Jose State University and Probability Management to develop a Risk Analysis tool that adheres to The Open Group Open FAIR™ Standard.

With a view to creating a tool that helps accelerate the adoption of the Open FAIR standard, the tool provides both experienced and novice risk practitioners with a practical and pragmatic tool to help analyse perceived risk in a consistent and simple to use way, whatever industry they work in. It is now ready and we are pleased to make it available to use and evaluate for free.

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New Security Architecture Practitioner’s Initiative

Organization leaders know they need cybersecurity, but 2017 has driven that point home with special force. Intelligence Agencies have shown that even the most secure targets are vulnerable, and the rapid proliferation of ransomware has demonstrated that damage can be crippling and come without warning.

The Security Architecture Practitioner’s Initiative is a joint effort of The Open Group Security Forum (a global thought leader in Enterprise Architecture) and The SABSA Institute (a global thought leader in Security Architecture) to articulate in a clear, approachable way the characteristics of a highly-qualified Security Architect.

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Cyber Disruption, State Government and the Constitution: Eric Sweden, NASCIO

In the digital age, whether an organization will experience a cyber disruption is not a question of “if” but “when?” Although disruptive events may be inevitable, organizations can be prepared with some strategizing and planning.

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