Q&A: GM security chief says cyberthreats lead to change

Eric Litt: 'I always say Sarbanes-Oxley and Mydoom are my best friends'

By Jaikumar Vijayan

June 18, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - As the chief information security officer at General Motors Corp., Eric Litt admits that he isn't exactly starved for attention within the company these days. Globalization, regulatory mandates and fast-evolving threats have put him at the front and center of GMs effort to integrate security into every aspect of its vast $186 billion business. Computerworld caught up with him at the recent SecurE-Biz CxO Security Summit, where Litt talked about the need for building security into information infrastructures.

What's driving security at GM these days? I always say Sarbanes-Oxley and Mydoom are my best friends. Everybody reacts to that in surprise and asks me, 'How can that be?' Whether it's regulations or worms, the reality is that they focus attention on security at the board level and force us to do things, even though they can be painful and challenging.
What does architecting security into information infrastructure really mean? Many people are talking just about the technology when they talk about security. We need to look at things much more holistically. That means the people, the organization, governance, process and lastly technology. One of the other key points is that security has to be driven by the business need. It has to have a strong linkage to business processes. From a security perspective, to be successful, you need support [from] the board and the CEO level down.
How do you go about doing all of this? We've built a model that is based upon the threats faced by a business. What are the threats we are trying to protect against? What are the things we are mandated to do that are aligned with the threat? [Sarbanes-Oxley] is an example. It deals with access control. Do we understand what the requirements are? Are we doing the things we need to do to comply with the regulation? Once we complete the exercise, we know what to do. Then we put in a governance model, the people and policies in place, and lastly we look at the technology.


Eric Litt, the chief information security officer at General Motors Corp.

How do you know if the requirements are being met? The way we have organized ourselves, we have a core set that architect policies and standards and drive it down to the level of templates, which are detailed implementation requirements [for each business]. This is what we do centrally. Then we rely on the business to implement them. I score businesses against compliance with the directives we have given, and I make the score card

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