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What Should We Do About Security Ethics?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 15, 2008 08:01 PM
from the try-wikileaks dept.
from the try-wikileaks dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am a senior security xxx in a Fortune 300 company and I am very frustrated at what I see. I see our customers turn a blind eye to blatant security issues, in the name of the application or business requirements. I see our own senior officers reduce the risk ratings of internal findings, and even strong-arm 3rd party auditors/testers to reduce their risk ratings on the threat of losing our business. It's truly sad that the fear of losing our jobs and the necessity of supporting our families comes first before the security of highly confidential information. All so executives can look good and make their bonuses? How should people start blowing the whistle on companies like this?"
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Submission: Security Ethics by Anonymous Coward
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What Should We Do About Security Ethics? (Score:5, Funny)
There are very few ethical companies. (Score:5, Insightful)
And why bother about security ethics when there are much more important ethical considerations like how they treat staff? Again, most companies screw most of their staff to the limit of the law.
In short: If you're looking for ethics you got off on the wrong planet.
Parent
Re:There are very few ethical companies. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with these two statements 100%, however...
And why bother about security ethics when there are much more important ethical considerations like how they treat staff? Again, most companies screw most of their staff to the limit of the law.
Treatment of staff is a strawman. It has no bearing on whether security is an issue. I was employed in a medical software company that did not treat their staff terribly yet managed to deploy products that were genuinely unsafe. This was in the imaging dept.of a medical records company - imaging handled diagnostic images as well as records for archival. This needed to be 100%+ HIPPA [hhs.gov] compliant and was nowhere close. While treatment of staff was decent, security with regard to medical records/images was not at all. I believe this to be an area where security is a huge priority over how the staff is treated.
Parent
Re:There are very few ethical companies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't even get me started. I work at a company which makes document imaging software and our customers send us all kinds of crap that honestly, scares the shit out of me. Not to mention information specifically protected by law. Most of the time, I get the sense that the sender didn't even remotely think about it. All they know is "this is not viewing/printing how it should" and so off they send it, as an attachment on unencrypted email.
So now I am put in the position of -- do I actually work on the client's problem? Or do I immediately destroy the information and tell them they are a dumbass? You know what the reality is? The highly sensitive document gets printed out, sometimes hundreds of times (as I tweak things during the debugging process), and I try to shred everything but when there's hundreds of copies, I'm sure I've missed one. If I was unscrupulous I could have made several million dollars off the information I see on a daily basis and I'm not exaggerating. Millions. Honestly it pisses me off.
Parent
Re:There are very few ethical companies. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember in my days consulting, I got sent a DB to look at. This DB held all the personal information for everyone who was worth over $X. The DB contained SSN's, spouse's name, spouse's SSN, etc. As soon as I saw this DB, I asked where the NDA for it was. When I was told there was no NDA sent over, I felt sorry for everyone who's information was in there.
Parent
Here's an interesting thought: (Score:5, Interesting)
When my company audits you and attests to the controls being in place and operating effectively, they essentially take legal responsibility for your internal controls. If we get strong-armed or bought off and decided to cover it up (which has never happened in my experience), we are on the legal hook for the results. We can be sued. The CPA that signs off on the audit can lose his license and get in all kinds of other trouble.
If one wanted to keep one's job, but wanted to whistleblow on this situation, one might be prudent to blow the whistle on the auditors (to the AICPA) for materially misstating the operating effectiveness of your company's controls. The auditors take the fall, and your company gets a pass by saying "Hey, we didn't know, they signed off on it!", and subsequently tightening up controls to ensure that no eyebrows are raised in the future.
Food for thought.
Parent
Re:What Should We Do About Security Ethics? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Leak
3. Profit !!
(May involve forfeiture of your immortal soul, prison time and other side effects.)
Parent
Re:What Should We Do About Security Ethics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Three Words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Three Words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work, security is a really big issue and I have to deal with people all the time that don't realize that security is something they should consider with every decision they make during the day. Needless to say, many don't feel the same way. They are about to get raked over the coals by management.
Unfortunately for some, they are in the crosshairs for their lax stance on security. I don't know what management is going to do with them, but management knows who they are and they stand a good chance of at least repremands and loss of pay increases, and at the worst for them, pink slips.
Anyone in IT who thinks data security isn't their job is fooling themselves and setting themselves up for a new career. If you read the SANS Newsbites, you see breach after breach and people getting sacked or worse.
People need to tighten up their systems, audit their systems, run configuration management, and even penetration test their systems. If you can show you are at least trying to cover your ass, you stand a better chance of being seen as proactive and trying to protect the company even if it does get breached.
But if something happens and it comes time to pick up the pieces, and all you can say is well, we shoulda done that but we didn't, you might want to have a plan B in terms of a career because you will probably need it.
Parent
Re:Three Words: (Score:5, Insightful)
When I am running a tech project at work, I simply schedule resources in the project plan for security assessment and risk abatement. If these are cut from the resource budget of the project, it is documented on whose authority such was removed from the project.
Basically stated: COVER your ass, and those below you. When those internal emails get leaked onto the internets or wikileaks it will be you shown as having 'concerns' about the security practices, and others who are guilty of the massive security problems being allowed to propagate. That makes finding the next job much easier.
Additionally, all managers can find a few hours here and there within their department resources to do some security auditing and testing. Showing these results on your status reports documents proactive use of company resources. Additionally, if you can show that customer xyz just survived an attack because of something you did, you may end up being given more slack to accomplish your true and altruistic goals ( - that is sad state of affairs ) of providing secure products and services. Each time the company suffers a loss through security problems and documents the cost of recovery, you can show next time what security auditing would have saved them if they had taken actions earlier, such as the nice plan you hand them to peruse which would stop future such attacks.
Parent
Re:Three Words: (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why add another hurdle to finding a job?
And that kind of attitude is what I see in some of my coworkers. Smartass people who think they know it all and just don't care about consequences. And coincidentally, those are the same ones in management's crosshairs. Pretty much without exception.
And also... always remember that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Gee, I dunno (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, you'll lose your job over it. So decide now. Do you want to sleep at night? Or do you want to feed your family?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, you'll lose your job over it. So decide now. Do you want to sleep at night? Or do you want to feed your family?
Re:Gee, I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Check around, maybe your company already has a CISSP on staff you could talk to. If not, as a large company you likely have an Info Security officer or manager, or perhaps a Loss Prevention or Asset Management department. Or perhaps you have someone in the networking area responsible for security (firewall installers, Active Directory admins, etc.) Corner the person in charge, and start asking him pointed questions, like "Did you see the news about company Y, who got hacked by exploiting this same vulnerability we've got?" "Have you done a risk analysis?" "What would you do if X happened?" "Do we have an incident response plan?"
Or maybe you take credit cards, and have a PCI auditor running around. It's their job to care about security holes. Get your findings to them.
Just saying "OMG, we're using WEP!" or "look, someone keeps pulling these XSS attacks on us, I told you so!" isn't likely to be earth shatteringly bad news; trust me, it's pretty much just irritating to those who politely listen to you whine. But offering constructive organizational advice might let these people know that you're not stupid, and that you really could help them improve their security.
If you're considering a career change into the security field, a positive attitude towards fixing the systemic problems (big picture, not just the one set of things you're looking at) might get you somewhere.
Parent
Wikileaks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wikileaks (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Wikileaks (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I am one of these employees and I'm not going to watch my job burn because the government is hiding blatent security problems. The next person that comes in will comply the same way and I'm left searching for a new job. No. What I do is purposely delay audit results. Miss a deadline here and there. Specifically mention other areas of concern while satisfying the customer by fast talking through another area. Results? It turned your governments security finding report from a B to a D. This past year sucked, work wise, but we're far more secure now than we were a year ago.
Just to scare you some more, we were sending backup tapes offsite without using encryption. We also didn't encrypt our laptops until the day before the government stipulated deadline. The best one? One of our budget management systems runs a public X server as root. Guess what else? We hold tons of medical, legal, and personal information for a very large number of you americans. Yea.
You're damn right we need to change how we address security concerns. I have no ideas on how to change this, so I will continue to be very cautious in my personal life. I will also continue to take contracts like this to ensure I can feed my family for the next couple of decades.
Parent
How my company handled it. (Score:5, Informative)
If you're failing SOX/SAS-70/404 audits (or whatever types of audits apply to you)... that's bad, although you've already identified that.
We formed a data security team - it's just one dedicated person right now, but since he's really only involved with the policy stuff, that's enough for us - however, he does hold frequent and regular meetings with management across all departments. The DS team recently published our "best practices" which every developer now has posted at his/her desk.
Because management took this very seriously, we became one of the first companies in our industry to have all of the current versions of our software fully compliant with industry security standards.
If there are no standards set forth for you, I suggest you make your own. It takes time and they must be well thought out, and no comprimises can be made (that's a bad pun, sorry). Use your audit results (the actual audit results, not the strong-armed ones) as a baseline for improvement. Dedicate a resource to data security. Whatever you have to do. Since you're a senior level person, you should be able to convince people to allow you to do it.
If you have security issues and a breach occurs, well... I think you know what could happen.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think one of the problems is the idea that has become prevalent that "business drives IT." This is taken by many to mean that business decides what IT does, and that IT's rules have to bend to the desires of business whenever they clash. Personally, I think this is asinine, especially because it leads to a completely unnecessary adversa
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you're failing SOX/SAS-70/404 audits (or whatever types of audits apply to you)... that's bad, although you've already identified that.
Now how the FUCK can you fail a SAS-70 audit? You get to set your own damn criteria for passing!
Ethics? Where? On Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
We have laws to restrict what people do and police to enforce those laws.
I know of one client, in an attempt to get a Federal contract, created a multi-million dollar program just to meet the "green" requirements that the Federal government is placing on new contacts.
Turns out - nothing much is being done except the bare minimum.
What is ethical is very different from that which is legal.
Because of my personal beliefs which stem from an often insulted and bashed faith, constantly mocked here on Slashdot, I do not sell the information I am privy to.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ethics in Business (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfair labor practices, shady reporting practices, Enron, The entire legal profession, The entire political category (is it truly a profession).
The point is, why single out one area of unethical behavior? Does it surprise you that the executives in our (Techie's Rule) should be any different?
Most executives make their way to the top by lying, cheating and stealing better than the next guy.
What can you expect?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the precipitate (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not really. After all, there are children dying of AIDS in Africa, of hunger all over the world. Old people are being neglected, education is a mess, etc. Apparently your strategy is to give up on doing anything because we can't do everything. The advantage of this approach is to make the problem so far beyond our powers to solve that we can justify not even trying.
In response, I call your attention to the words of a sage from when things were a hell of a lot worse: "It is not for you to finish the task - nor are you free to desist from it."
It may be trite, but doing something to improve one corner of the world beats whining on /. about how bad it all is.
Parent
Think about where the problem really lies (Score:4, Insightful)
All business decisions should be made on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Most staff positions including security usually do a poor job of assessing either side and instead focus on potential risks without quantifying them. Just because security would be better by doing X, does not mean X is good idea. If X is really expensive and your competitors do not it, your firm is now at a cost disadvantage
which depending on the industry can be catastrophic.
I really have no way of knowing whether actions you are talking about really negative expected value actions or not in the sense that over a long period the risks involved will be realized and the damage will be far greater than the cost of taking preventative action. However, changing ratings is troublesome. A much better process is a well defined override or exception procedure. The business should understand what they are doing. A rigid system that says we can not do anything rated 'Y' even if there is 100M at stake will only result in the rating be changed.
Re:Think about where the problem really lies (Score:4, Insightful)
But before cost-benefit analysis even begins, problems to be solved are classified by their risk. There is a class of problems that absolutely must be solved regardless of the cost. If you're writing a filesystem, anything that has the remotest chance of data loss is unacceptable, regardless of how slow it is. If one of these crucial elements costs too much for the system to handle, take out something else.
A large number of businesses don't seem to see anything as unacceptable risk. Medical companies, car manufacturers, baby toy manufacturers, etc. consider anything that could possibly cause loss of human life an unacceptable risk. Banks and retailers should treat anything with the remotest possibility of leakage of customer data a must fix problem, and this means IT security should get done, regardless of cost.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it national security?
Is somebody going to die or come to serious harm?
Or is it more mundane? Maybe some future business ideas will leak out and diminish their value. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities and the mundane once ought to be decided on cost.
After all the most secure computer is one that's kept in a locked, guarded room with no network connections what so ever. It's just not a very produ
Essay: Catch 222-22-2222 (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=9 [aarongreenspan.com]
The sad fact is that I don't report flaws anymore because I've been threatened too many times.
Re:Essay: Catch 222-22-2222 (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Not much (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see how there is much you can do. There was an article here a few months ago about a group that started sending out bad XML because too many people were using the DTD they were hosting, to the tune of 10,000s of hits a day that were completely unnecessary.
The company I work (not Fortune 500, smaller) sees some stuff that continues to floor me. Our dealings are mostly transactions of information (containing important things like bank accounts) between our computes and those of other companies. We have had to, quite a few times, flat out turn people down because they refuse to run securely. Not without massive DB encryption. Not hashing everything. Just not using SSL, an easy to implement addition on top of HTTP (which carries our conversations with people).
Every two months or so, we are put in the position of telling people that the SSL certificate on their production system expired last night. This usually entails a discussion as to why we can't just let them slide, or give them a day, etc. We've had people switch off good SSL certificates from very valid authorities to self-signed certificates.
In fact the expiration problem happened enough that someone seriously suggested we consider making a little program to check people's certificates and warn us when they were going to expire so we could warn them. Things got better and it didn't happen. Many people just don't care.
I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end. Then they called our office to make sure we knew it was about to expire and to find out if we really wanted that to happen. Then today, a few weeks after it expired, I got an email reminding me that it expired and they'd be glad to renew it. I don't know how many companies are this proactive about renewing SSL certs, but I'd have had to have my head buried pretty far in the sand to not have noticed all that.
We've seen plenty of poor security designs. I don't expect other operations to be perfectly secure. But the number of these companies who seem either ignorant or dismissive of SSL continues to surprise me from time to time.
Best advice? If you can at all, shut them down. Very few of the companies we have worked with have been very nice about turning on SSL. Some have said "just add S to the URL" (it was secure, they just didn't give us that URL). Some have said "sorry, we'll get that right up". More than a few have not been that easy. Turning people off is the best power we have. If your contracts are big enough (as a Fortune 300 company, they might be) you could try to put security provisions in them with penalties for shenanigans. But we've found that when discussions aren't working, just disconnecting people usually gets their attention.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end.
Actually, it's pretty easy. See, Jim punched in his email address back when we first got the certificate, so we'd been getting the notices at jim@example.com. Things were fine for a while, but then Jim moved on to another company. Fortunately, we had another Jim, so we just gave the email account to him when the first Jim left, and things were fine.
Last month Jim turned in his two weeks' notice.
By the way, we've got an entry level opening some of you might be interested in, just need a PhD, 10 years exp
Bosses don't fear security breaches (Score:4, Interesting)
It is strange. We can't let a piece of equipment that isn't UL approved within a mile of our building. We have a guy whose whole job is to audit all the equipment and make sure it conforms. Security, on the other hand, isn't audited. The bosses sure don't fear us the way they fear the outside people who do all the other audits.
Clearly it would be a good thing if someone were setting standards for security the way UL does for electrical equipment. It would be good to have outside auditors. Only then will the in-house security people get any respect.
How to blow the whistle (Score:5, Insightful)
Step two: Find another job. If you take a cut, see step one.
Step three: Pull no punches when you resign. Leave a resignation letter stating that you cannot in good conscience continue to sweep serious liabilities under the rug, and that under the circumstances you have no choice but to leave. Copy the BOD. If you want to really play hardball, copy the company's liability underwriters.
Make no mistake, this is a major bridge-burning exercise. It may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to your career, but don't count in it. See step one.
Kay Sara Sara (Score:3, Informative)
I too worked for a company that catered to the people that made money for it. $40 billion+ in assets at the time. No matter how hard I tried security ALWAYS took a back seat to profit, ease of use, and not rocking the boat. I was the head of network security, there was not even a CSO. The hierarchy wasn't even in place. One day I even saw a live network hack in progress as one of our network engineers was using a VNC server not protected by our corporate firewall! Someone on the outside had found it and started using his desktop! I couldn't believe my eyes! In the end it came down to me just accepting that this company, and a vast majority of corporations, will always and forever be run this way...until, of course, the proverbial $#It hits the fan, at which point I didn't want to be there.
So I left and never looked back. I suggest that this also be your course of action before the one left holding the bag is you.
Check out the culture. If doomed, leap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be a whistleblower, be an activist for change. See if you have a risk compliance manager and talk to them, ask for their advice. At worst, you'll get your name known in the higher echelons, at best you'll get your own way. Most people will shy away from a confrontation, but love giving advice in a tricky situation.
Your mileage may vary, and I may be full of compost. Think and do.
Fraudulent Security Audit practices (Score:5, Insightful)
You say you are an uber security drone with a Fortune 300 company and that you *know* of fraudulent business practices to help the company earn better ratings on its security policies. I'm guessing that some of these impact SOX/404, SAS-70, and probably ALL would be of concern to the company's shareholders and business trading partners. Like it or not, you are now either complicit or you are obligated to inform oversight authorities. Your first duty
should be to your own profession's standard of behavior, your second to the company shareholders, your third to the public's interest, and last to your management chain.
You seem to be entertaining the idea of moving management's priorities to the head of the list and that would be to make yourself complicit. The fact that it would be difficult to prosecute you does not make that considered behavior any less criminal. You will have to live with that knowledge for a long time. I have friends who worked at Enron who to this day have valid concerns about the resume stain they have earned from their time there. Are you willing to bear that also?
How you go about protecting yourself from reprisals is up to you and the reporting authority, but surely anonymous 'tip' reporting is possible. Given senior management is the problem, that is a strong candidate for your response. I would also recommend you document your allegations as best you may and make them to the SEC and your local branch of the FBI. Either agency might request you remain with the company while they investigate your allegations. Otherwise, it may be time to vote with your feet and find employment elsewhere.
You more than anyone should know what will be the eventual outcome of improperly securing vital systems. Do you want it to happen on your watch or to have to answer difficult questions later
about why you did not strongly resist or report events which will lead to that security breach? Do you want the stigma to attach itself to your resume? Do you want to sleep on the knowledge that you passively participated in criminal conspiracy by voluntarily remaining silent?
You cannot fault the ethics of your superiors if you fail to execute upon your own. What are you made of? Decide,and then live with the decision. It only appears to be a difficult decision if you have an off-switch upon your professional ethics.
Re:Fraudulent Security Audit practices (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, management was correct to lower the risk of this flaw, because they mitigated it. Access controls to that particular system were moved to a web-based terminal emulator, which is secured by complex passwords and a two-factor authentication system. Those six character passwords were randomized daily and linked to a specific user in the emulation system.
All I am saying is that there is a difference between fraud, negligence and compromise. Just because management is twisting the arm of a zealous auditor, or the infosec crew is pissed off because their latest policy or acquisition got shot down doesn't mean your organization is run by Gorden Gecko or Ken Lay. Money and resources are not in unlimited supply, and sometimes standards need to be compromised or worked-around so that business can continue.
If you're ethical standards can't handle that, you'd better move to academia or write security books, because there isn't an non-trivial environment anywhere that achieves perfect adherence to security standards.
Parent
perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Many computer guys tend to be alarmist and see the world in black and white. Many security firms rate problems only based on potential damage without consideration for existing mitigations elsewhere in the system or the reality of targeting from attackers. Consider your company's situation carefully.
If, after much deliberation, you are certain legitimate problems exist that must be fixed (versus managed) then talk to the managers in their language: build a business case. You work for a company, the company's job is to make money. Security costs money. You must clearly articulate how the security improvements will make money or stop the company from losing money. It's all engineering, in the end. It's just engineering with words and numbers.
Cheers.
- jj
Change starts with you. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sarbanes-Oxley (Score:3, Interesting)
This law makes the company CEO responsible for making any material mis-statements. If the security in question involves financial information, or if it would affect the financial standing of the company in the eyes of investors, it cannot be covered up.
There may also be other regulatory agencies involved, such as the FDA, FAA, etc.
If this is the case, tell the people pushing for the cover-up that you will gladly comply. But, after the sh*t hits the fan, you will visit the CEO in prison and tell him/her exactly who was responsible for generating the mis-statements.
IANAL, so you should check with one first.
The uses of publicity (Score:4, Insightful)
Public embarrassment can be useful. We publish a list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams [sitetruth.com]. These are major domains where an attacker has found a security hole allowing them to exploit the site for phishing purposes. There are 65 sites on the list. There used to be about 140, but by nagging and publicity, we've been able to get most big-name sites to tighten up. Now and then some big site makes the list, but it often disappears within hours as the hole is plugged.
So it actually is possible to get big companies to tighten up security, if you do it right.
Laws written by legislators that understand tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Today: We are in the phase of judges trying to claim that putting a program into RAM might be an illegal copy process, and demanding a core dump as evidence.
The Future: We need mandatory hard records of specified sensitive transactions (e.g.: e-voting, health, finance), we need whistleblower laws that protect what would otherwise be considered improper employee investigation and documentation of ephemeral computer records (it looks a lot like espionage), and we need legislators that understand the technology economy, and know where new laws are needed, and where the old ones will suffice.
Then we need to fund enforcement, which has taken a dive in recent years.
The newly qualified legislators are scheduled to arrive in Congress in about 20-40 years, if the older tech-savvy generation can teach the new aspirants to value their own privacy, and get them to understand that the fifth amendment doesn't apply if you put it all up on MySpace. I have confidence that these qualified people will eventually come to Congress.
Until then, enjoy the wait. In the short term, enforcement money, and will, has been gutted. In the long term, the Congress is not yet savvy to these issues, so the law is inadequate, and new law is written by lobbyists who want less accountability, not more.
Unfortunately, you don't have a leg to stand on while we amend the unintended consequences of our move to the "paperless society." I'm sorry.
--
Toro
Rule Number 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
The bottom line is this, it does not matter one lick how many security measures you put in
place. Short of completely disconnecting the network from every point of entry and encrypting
the entire network. Your security measures are not going to survive a determined attack from
someone with at most average hacking skills. The best you can do is to point out the risks
and figure out how to respond when your network gets owned because someday it is going to.
Security it always a trade off and a continuous game of cat and mouse. It is all about being open
enough to get the job done while doing your best to inform and mitigate the risk.
Stop Being A Security Professional and use Risk (Score:4, Interesting)
So I'd first get a proper definition of risk. I'd start with:
(probable frequency x probable magnitude of loss)
Risk must be a probability issue, and it needs to be expressed as a derived value (how frequently something bad will happen, and how much it will most likely hurt). I recommend using FAIR (see the Open Group website) as a means to derive risk. FAIR was developed by a Fortune 100 CISO who had a similar problem.
It is a Bayesian Network for risk expression, which results in the best probability outcome that your prior information will allow, but more importantly it will help you work with auditors and the data owners to identify any dispute about the amount of risk the organization has by working through the composite factors involved. FAIR also provides KPIs for discreet risk issues.
Next, you need to expend whatever political capital involved and get some flavor of Risk Tolerance/Appetite from the C-Suite. A 15 minute with the CFO with the right questions prepared ahead of time should suffice. Join ISACA and find someone who is all hyped up on COSO. The COSO evangelist will likely help you develop the right questions for the price of a nice lunch. There are good things and things that suck about COSO, but you can use the "Internal Environment" and "Objective Setting" functions of COSO to develop a risk tolerance.
Finally, you need to stop thinking about security in terms of IP addresses, and think in terms of the business processes they support. Businesses, outside of Information Security Departments, usually couldn't give a rats@ss about what a scanner says about an IP address. They want to know the risk (FAIR, above) around the business process that makes them money.
Let me also suggest that if you're already feeling commoditized there, the business isn't going to care about "compliance" either. Hitting them over the head constantly with a large GLBA/HIPAA/PCI/SOX/Whatever hammer might get you some budget, but it's not going to get you credibility.
I'd also work with your CISO to get the company to change the name of your group to Information Risk Management to better reflect your value to the company. You may also want to join the SecurityCatalyst.com website (smart people there) and subscribe to the RSS feed of the Security Bloggers Network on Feedburner.