Data and Security

I'm noticing a crossroads of data and security in a lot of job descriptions lately. Especially in the financial/banking and health care sectors. What I was wondering is it possible to leverage a heavy data oriented background into one of these roles from your experiences?

For instance a certain banking company has a ton of jobs out there requiring a data background, database, SQL, data analysis with a security component.

Is this a one off sort of thing, or is this becoming the norm? I personally have a lot of heavy data experience, but not much in security. With that said the job reqs for these positions look to melt both of these roles together.

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DZA_

I'm currently at a Canadian financial institution and I haven't recently skimmed through the data roles on our job postings internally (we have a ton) but I suspect that the usual big data positions should require some understanding of security because you're dealing with large sensitive data sets. I'll check back when I'm in the office on Tuesday. A general sense, having a baseline of security knowledge to go along with database compliment both skill sets. My prediction that this is going to be the trend as we gear towards of in taking a lot of more information from IoT devices and such. Perhaps, start taking some introductory security courses to get your feet wet if you haven't had a lot of exposure to security.

Cheers,

DatabaseHead

DZA_ wrote: »

I'm currently at a Canadian financial institution and I haven't recently skimmed through the data roles on our job postings internally (we have a ton) but I suspect that the usual big data positions should require some understanding of security because you're dealing with large sensitive data sets. I'll check back when I'm in the office on Tuesday. A general sense, having a baseline of security knowledge to go along with database compliment both skill sets. My prediction that this is going to be the trend as we gear towards of in taking a lot of more information from IoT devices and such. Perhaps, start taking some introductory security courses to get your feet wet if you haven't had a lot of exposure to security.

Cheers,

I appreciate the advice. You make a lot of sense and thanks for checking your companies job positions.

Any certification recommendations that snap into the data space?

DZA_

I did a quick check online regarding database security certifications specifically and Oracle has some specific ones on their website (quite expensive) and then you have the general database security courses that are provided from Udemy:

https://education.oracle.com/oracle-database/database-security/product_482
https://www.udemy.com/database-security-for-cyber-professionals/

Databases are databases no matter how you look at it, but depending on your skillset you can leverage the following:

1) Aligning to vendor specific database technology stack and taking their security certificates that line up with their product(s) e.g. Amazon or Oracle
OR
2) Take up general security certifications (Security+, CISSP, OSCP?) - Others can chime in here whether these are a bit overkill

The second approach forms a more well rounded security individual vs to some of the specific vendor related technologies and their security certificates as I mentioned before. What you do want is to understand with database security is to ensure that you have the right and correct access and security controls on top of your database stack . E.g. Allowing the right resources to query data only to what they have accessed to. Ensuring only restricted commands are defined by the user role, making sure that your database is not susceptible to a SQL injection), database DLP and so on. I don't have expertise in this field so I can't give you an exhaustive list but these are some of the things that come to mind when talking and thinking about "database security".

Cheers,

UnixGuy

yes I work with a data science team within the security team, they try to make sense of the data to aid in cyber hunting, etc. But I don't fully understand what they do!

DatabaseHead

UnixGuy wrote: »

yes I work with a data science team within the security team, they try to make sense of the data to aid in cyber hunting, etc. But I don't fully understand what they do!

That sounds really awesome. Any recommendations on books or CBT's that fall into that space?

FluffyBunny

DatabaseHead wrote: »

That sounds really awesome. Any recommendations on books or CBT's that fall into that space?

I could misinterpret UnixGuy's post, but it sounds like they're referring to "threat hunting" using tools like Splunk or the ELK-stack.

eLearnSecurity, among many others, have introductory trainings on threat hunting.

UnixGuy

DatabaseHead wrote: »

That sounds really awesome. Any recommendations on books or CBT's that fall into that space?

no books per se, they have masters in data analytics. They use R, Python, and other tools (not Splunk or ELK), but they do have a tool that has an end point agent where they collect information about the endpoint.

I'm not 100% convinced of the utility of this yet.

I have used a tool called Dark Trace, that baselines your environment and alerts on any anomalies...you don't need any data analytics for this.

DatabaseHead

I appreciate the insights UG.

DZA_

So I've checked the internal hiring boards and I didn't find too much regarding database + security in the same posting. For our organization, we're pretty large enough to have our own security governance team and specialists that review the security configuration and perform audits, etc. Nonetheless, I would still get have a firm understanding of initial database security concepts as I mentioned before. For big data, I would have understanding of how to secure APIs and how big data can be stored securely and transferred securely.

Cheers,