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Industry Security Notices (ISNs)

 A Industry Security Notice (ISN) is an official document that tells people in industry about important instructions, guidance or other information relating to security.

Information from Ministry of Defence, that provides updates.

• ‘ISN 2014/04 Farnborough International Air Show 2014: exhibition clearances’ has been removed

• ‘ISN 2014/01: Government Security Classification Scheme’ updated April 2014

• ‘ISN 2011/05 Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEi) 2011: exhibition clearances’ has been removed

• ‘ISN 2011/02: incident report’ has been superseded by ‘2011/07: incident reporting’

• ‘ISN 2011/03: Nato personnel security clearances’ has been superseded by ‘2014/03: Procedure for UK contractors to obtain Nato personnel security clearances’

Ensuring that the right candidates are selected for policing roles is essential. Employing the right selection process is essential to make the most efficient use of money, time and resources and can have the following benefits:

• Reduce the probability of selecting individuals who will not perform at their jobs effectively.

• Better value at the national Assessment process

• Minimises disproportionality in outcomes for underrepresented groups

• Maximise candidates potential by supporting, them and ensuring a positive candidate experience.

It is known that not all forces handle their recruitment process in the same way in the early process and therefore causes discrepancies in the way people are recruited in the police force. A sifting solution is being undertaken that aims to help effectively mange candidates. Whilst this is still on-going, this document aims to help police forces consider some key principles for an effective end-to-end recruitment process.

Each area should be considered:

• Recruitment strategy

• Attraction campaign and positive action

• Registration

• Force selection

• National Assessment Process

• Post-assessment process activity

• Appointment

Monitoring of each area and collaborating with other learning providers are critical to the improvement, maximisation and best practise of the selection process.

Data sanitisation is a key aspect to any organisations dealing with data storage media and who want to ensure that unauthorised parties do not gain access to their data.

Data sanitisation has to do with the safe removal, treatments and disposal of sensitive information from storage media devices to guarantee that retrieval and reconstruction of data is not possible or may be very difficult to reproduce as some forms of sanitisation will allow you to re-use the media, while others are destructive in nature and render the media unusable.

There could be many reasons why an organisation may want to sanitise its data:

• Re-use purposes – new user device allocation, re-purpose or resell device.

• Repair purposes - return or repair faulty device

• Disposal purposes – dispose of device

• Destruction purposes – destroy information held on device or the device itself.

There are risks associated with improper sanitisation as key data may still remain on the device, such as:

• Sensitive data may end up with the wrong people who can expose the sensitive data

• Loss of control over information assets

• Private or personal data could be leaked and used to commit fraud or identity theft.

• Intellectual property could be used leading to reputational loss

Whilst this may not be entirely a sanitisation issue, it is part of it and one way to combat these risks is using encryption.

Guidance on how organisations should secure their technology and services to protect UK government information classified as OFFICIAL. 

The vast majority of UK government public services are conducted at the Official classification. Business operations and services include information routinely used that can have damaging consequences if lost or stolen.

Security at Official is achieved through following good commercial practices and understanding security needs and matching these requirements to the latest available technology availabilities. 

Guidance for organisations deploying a range of end user device platforms as part of a remote working solution.

Modern smartphones, laptops and tablets provide users with great flexibility and functionality, and include security technologies to help protect information and as such this security guidance document is general to all end user devices (EUD) and their deployments to help harness its security capabilities without hindering its functioning ability by ensuring device configuration are set up correctly.

This guidance is to help optimise security functions, allow for greater user responsibility to reduce security complexity, maintaining user experience, logging and audit information and enable greater interoperability of IT systems.

Intelligence is information collected and gathered for the purpose of taking action. This process is continuous and critical to effective policing operations that allow for tactical options and prioritisation. Such intelligence can sometimes be classified as confidential or sensitive.

A Code of Practice has been issued by the secretary of state to develop a national intelligence model (NIM), which sets out principles and standards for chief officer and police and crime commissioners to adhere. Ensures the results of the standards are systematic for continuous progress and also helps promote compatibility of procedures and terminology for the (NIM) as well as monitor and evaluate the promulgation of good practice.

The code of the practice came into effect in January 2005.

All public services sending emails out on behalf of government organisations must follow all protocols, processes and guidelines to ensure that they secure their email service. This includes:

• the service providing users with mailbox access

• internal relays and gateways

• email filtering services

• third party services that send email on your behalf, like transactional email services

Key configurations are needed to ensure you email services run smoothly:

• Transport Layer Security (TLS)

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

• Public Domain Name System (DNS)

• Ability to make administrative changes

If there are any changes made to your email security, ensure that you communicate such changes to all staff in your organisation.

This guidance applies to all email domains that public sector organisations run on the internet. It also helps ensures that public sector organisations exchanges email securely with other public sector organisations. Protecting emails in transit makes it difficult for domains to be spoofed.

All public sector emails must be kept secure by:

• encrypting and authenticating email in transit by supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) as a minimum

• making sure the recipient protects the data you send to them

• making email security invisible to end users as far as practically possible

Encryption and authentication only work if both the sender and the recipient use them.

The Government Digital Service recommends protecting email by:

• forcing TLS when sending to .gov.uk

• forcing TLS when sending to any other domains that supports it if the local risk profile requires it

• using extra encryption services if needs be

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) verifies an email’s domain and ensures it has not been tampered with in transit. The receiving email service can then filter or reject email that fails the DKIM check. In order for DKIM to verify an emails domain it uses public key encryption to check email by creating a hash using the content of each outbound email. The sending service then encrypts the hash with its private key and adds it to the email header. This is the DKIM signature.

The receiving email service looks up the public key in the sender’s DKIM DNS (DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM) record then uses the public key to decrypt the DKIM signature on the email. It also generates a hash of the email in the same way the sending email service did. If the hash matches the decrypted DKIM signature then the email passes the DKIM check. This means the email came from where it says it came from and has not changed in transit.

An agreed and designed common data standards are used by the Criminal Justice System, ICT suppliers to support ICT communications between systems used by Criminal Justice Organisations (CJO) to support CJS operations. They are also used with open data standards as defined in the government’s Open Standards Principles. These common standards are also used to support data analytics, bidding for CJS contracts etc.

The selection of the CJS data standards is made by the CJS Data Standards Forum. This is a technical forum which has representatives from the principal CJOs.

There is a Data Standard Catalogue used to support the exchange of criminal justice information between different CJOs.

There are three different types of data standard reflected in the catalogued:

• formatting standards

• organisational structure standards

• reference data standard

The Data Standard catalogue is constantly reviewed by the Data Standards Forum to ensure a set of standards is produced that is as small as possible while still being fit for purpose.