Verizon “Redefines” VERIS, Improves Open Information Sharing
Verizon Business has publicly released the data anonymously submitted by organizations to its incident-sharing program and promised changes to make the system more collaborative and useful.
In addition, Verizon launched veriscommunity.net as a centralized source of information for all things VERIS, Wade Baker, direct of risk intelligence at Verizon Business, wrote on the Verizon Risk Team Security Blog. The original wiki that contained previously collected data would be moved to the new site, Baker said. A XML schema and related resources have been added to a github repository to aid in VERIS development efforts, Baker said.
VERIS is an incident sharing system developed and launched back in 2010 to encourage members to collaborate and improve incident response processes. It was intended to be a framework of incident elements that will help people better interpret data and manage risk, and developed as part of the RISK team’s work on the annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, Baker said at the time.
“We strongly believe that data collection, analysis and sharing is hands down, the best use of our collective resources moving forward,” Baker wrote.
The free website is designed to make it easier for organizations to share anonymous details about security breaches. This way, breached organizations can try to to identify the cause of a breach, measure its potential impact, and compare incident details with other organizations.
Verizon previously launched the VERIS Community application to provide organizations with an actual mechanism for reporting and sharing incident data. VERIS published “some initial findings” a few months later based on community submissions, but hadn’t followed through with regular updates since then, Baker said.
All that is going to change, as “every valid submission to the VERIS Community application will be added to a dataset that is publicly accessible” from now on, Baker said. A dashboard would allow members to view and manipulate VERIS Community data to whatever purpose.
“It’s your data, and we apologize for taking so long to make it useful to you,” Baker said.
However, there was one caveat: Organizations should treat the dataset currently available as test data and not “something to drive next year’s security decisions,” Baker said. Some of the submissions received so far are actually test cases, bogus entries, or faulty selections. There will be some changes in the interface to make it easier to clearly identify test cases from real incidents, and the training materials will be improved to help users avoid errors, Baker said.
“We’re excited to see where this leads, and glad to be able to play a part in making incident sharing more than just a nice concept,” Baker said.
Verizon also changed the definition of the VERIS acronym. Previously defined as the “Verizon Enterprise Risk and Incident Sharing” framework, VERIS has been changed to “Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing,” Baker wrote. Having the Verizon in the name may have hindered adoption, Baker said, adding that “Enterprise Risk” wasn’t quite accurate as VERIS was intended to create information that could be used within a risk management framework
The new acronym “more accurately ” reflected that VERIS was a common language to describe the series of events comprising a security incident and sharing that information with others, Baker explained.
