Acuity Brands, Inc. announced the formation of a Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), which will supplement existing security programs by coordinating stakeholder interests regarding security concerns that potentially impact connected products and cloud-based infrastructure. All Acuity Brands products containing a software component in their use, maintenance, or management will be serviced by PSIRT. Additionally, the team will manage the receipt, investigation, and notification procedure with an extended group of collaborators which may include customers, consultants, security researchers, academic institutions, and other vendors.
PSIRT provides a proactive and centralized approach for security concerns arising from the increasingly digital market. This approach is designed to reduce the response time for releasing patches for security vulnerabilities and to improve the security posture of Acuity Brands technology-based products and services.
The following figure provides a high-level view of the product security response process.
- Awareness: information is received regarding a potential security vulnerability
- Triage: the report is validated, prioritized, and resources identified
- Analysis: impact assessment is conducted, and remediation plan developed
- Coordination: all collaborators are made aware of the timelines
- Remediation: fixes are released, and cloud-based services are updated
- Notification: affected customers are notified
- Feedback: post-remediation activities are performed
“To continually improve our best practices, Acuity Brands has joined the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), which fosters cooperation and coordination in incident prevention, stimulates rapid reaction to incidents, and promotes information sharing among members and the community at large,” said Mark-David McLaughlin, Director of Security and Risk Management, Acuity Brands Lighting. “FIRST’s documentation and the ISO 30111 standard were used as references for the development of the PSIRT program.”
The Product Security Incident Response Team will be focused on, but not limited to, the products sold under the following brands: Atrius™, Dark To Light® (DTL), DGLogik, Distech Controls®, eldoLED®, Fresco™, Holophane®, IOTA®, Lucid®, LC&D™, nLight®, nLight® AIR, ROAM®, Sensor Switch®, Synergy®, and XPoint™ Wireless. Integral to this effort is an enhanced customer communication strategy that includes security bulletins and a dedicated contact.
For timely updates, users should subscribe to Acuity’s security bulletins.
