Announcing SEC OCIE Dashboards for Financial Services

Tenable is excited to release a set of dashboards, reports and components that help our financial services customers collect and document necessary data for the SEC Office of Compliance Inspection Examinations Risk Alert. The Risk Alert includes an Appendix that is a sample request for documents and information, which the SEC OCIE can use to evaluate the organization’s security program. This content leverages Tenable Network Security’s SecurityCenter Continuous View (CV) along with its Continuous Monitoring framework to ease the effort needed to follow the guidelines in the Risk Alert.

While not a mandatory regulation, the OCIE states that its “cybersecurity initiative is designed to assess cybersecurity preparedness in the securities industry and to obtain information about the industry’s recent experiences with certain types of cyber threats. As part of this initiative, OCIE will conduct examinations of more than 50 registered broker-dealers and registered investment advisers focused on the following: the entity’s cybersecurity governance, identification and assessment of cybersecurity risks, protection of networks and information, risks associated with remote customer access and funds transfer requests, risks associated with vendors and other third parties, detection of unauthorized activity, and experiences with certain cybersecurity threats.”

OCIE Sample Requests Categorized

The information requests in the Appendix advocate various cybersecurity practices. In general, cybersecurity practices can be grouped into the seven “goal” areas listed below:

1. Maintain accurate inventories - For physical devices, software platforms and applications.
2. Maintain knowledge of normal operations - For example, expected connections and data flows, utilization of encryption, backup services, documentation of policy and procedures, etc.
3. Discover vulnerabilities and track remediation progress - Includes prioritizing remediations based on risk assessment.
4. Prevent unauthorized activity - Involves monitoring for and preventing unauthorized activity such as use of unauthorized devices, unauthorized connections, unauthorized escalation of user privileges, unauthorized access and unauthorized changes.
5. Monitor for malicious activity - Involves monitoring for (and, where possible, preventing) malicious activity, such as malware and botnet activity and denial of service.
6. Monitor for data loss - Involves monitoring for (and, where possible, preventing) data leakage and data loss.
7. Measure compliance - Involves conducting audits to determine compliance with policies and accepted standards.

The Tenable suite of products can assist a firm in achieving these goals. Tenable’s SecurityCenter Continuous View™ allows a single console to administer continuous active scanning, passive detection, log analysis, vulnerability management and compliance checking across an organization. Because SecurityCenter CV is completely scalable and customizable, dashboards and reports can be fine-tuned to deliver the most advanced analysis of cybersecurity risks. SecurityCenter CV allows organizations to improve cybersecurity threat mitigation by integrating vulnerability and threat management into one package.

To learn more about these capabilities and for further details please download the US SEC OCIE Solution Brief. Or for a more detailed mapping, please download the Tenable SEC Risk Alert Reference Guide.