Complying with Technology Risk Management (TRM) Guidelines of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)

Regulation Overview

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published Technology Risk Management (TRM) Guidelines to help financial firms establish sound technology risk management, strengthen system security, and safeguard sensitive data and transactions.

The TRM contains statements of industry best practices that financial institutions conducting business in Singapore are expected to adopt. The MAS makes clear that, while the TRM requirements are not legally binding, they will be a benchmark the MAS uses in assessing the risk of financial institutions.

Guideline Descriptions

• 8.4.4 The FI should encrypt backup tapes and disks, including USB disks, containing sensitive or confidential information before they are transported offsite for storage.
• 9.1.6 Confidential information stored on IT systems, servers and databases should be encrypted and protected through strong access controls, bearing in mind the principle of “least privilege”.
• 11.0.1.c Access control principle – The FI should only grant access rights and system privileges based on job responsibility and the necessity to have them to fulfill one's duties. The FI should check that no person by virtue of rank or position should have any intrinsic right to access confidential data, applications, system resources or facilities.
• 11.1.1 The FI should only grant user access to IT systems and networks on a need-to-use basis and within the period when the access is required. The FI should ensure that the resource owner duly authorises and approves all requests to access IT resources.
• 11.2 Privileged Access Management.
• 11.2.3.d. Grant privileged access on a “need-to-have” basis.
• 11.2.3.e. Maintain audit logging of system activities performed by privileged users.
• 11.2.3.f. Disallow privileged users from accessing systems logs in which their activities are being captured.
• 13 payment card security (automated teller machines, credit and debit cards).

Thales can help your organization keep data breaches from happening in the first place through:

• Access control to ensure only credentialed users have access to your systems and data
• Sensitive data discovery and classification
• Encryption, tokenization and cryptographic key management to ensure that if data is stolen, it will be meaningless and useless to cybercriminals
• Security intelligence logs to identify irregular access patterns and breaches in progress

Strong access management and authentication

Thales Access Management and Authentication solutions provide both the security mechanisms and reporting capabilities organizations need to comply with data security regulations. Our solutions protect sensitive data by enforcing the appropriate access controls when users log into applications that store sensitive data. By supporting a broad range of authentication methods and policy driven role-based access, our solutions help enterprises mitigate the risk of data breach due to compromised or stolen credentials or through insider credential abuse.

Support for smart single sign on and step-up authentication allows organizations to optimize convenience for end users, ensuring they only have to authenticate when needed. Extensive reporting allows businesses to produce a detailed audit trail of all access and authentication events, ensuring they can prove compliance with a broad range of regulations.

Data discovery and classification

The first step in protecting sensitive data is finding the data wherever it is in the organization, classifying it as sensitive, and typing it (e.g. PII, financial, IP, HHI, customer-confidential, etc.) so you can apply the most appropriate data protection techniques. It is also important to monitor and assess data regularly to ensure new data isn’t overlooked and your organization does not fall out of compliance.

Thales’ CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification efficiently identifies structured as well as unstructured sensitive data on-premises and in the cloud. Supporting both agentless and agent-based deployment models, the solution provides built-in templates that enable rapid identification of regulated data, highlight security risks, and help you uncover compliance gaps. A streamlined workflow exposes security blind spots and reduces remediation time. Detailed reporting supports compliance programs and facilitates executive communication.

Protection of sensitive data at rest

Separation of privileged access users and sensitive user data

With the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, administrators can create strong separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners. CipherTrust Transparent Encryption encrypts files, while leaving their metadata in the clear. In this way, IT administrators -- including hypervisor, cloud, storage, and server administrators -- can perform their system administration tasks, without being able to gain privileged access to the sensitive data residing on the systems they manage.

Separation of administrative duties

Strong separation of duties policies can be enforced to ensure one administrator does not have complete control over data security activities, encryption keys, or administration. In addition, the CipherTrust Manager supports two-factor authentication for administrative access.

Granular privileged access controls

The CipherTrust Data Security Platform can enforce very granular, least-privileged-user access management policies, enabling protection of data from misuse by privileged users and APT attacks. Granular privileged-user-access management policies can be applied by user, process, file type, time of day, and other parameters. Enforcement options can control not only permission to access clear-text data, but what file-system commands are available to a user.

Protection of sensitive data in motion

Thales High Speed Encryptors (HSEs) provide network independent data-in-motion encryption (Layers 2,3 and 4) ensuring data is secure as it moves from site-to-site, or from on-premises to the cloud and back. Our HSE solutions allow customers to better protect data, video, voice, and metadata from eavesdropping, surveillance, and overt and covert interception—all at an affordable cost and without performance compromise.