Recently in musings Category

It's been nearly 2 years since I've written anything for my blog here, and I can't say that there's much of a good reason for it. Part of the reason has been prohibitions from past employers on doing anything public without their express approval, but the sad truth is that - despite a few ideas popping up here or there - I've just lacked the energy or wherewithal to really sitting and put word to prose.

I had resolved at the start of 2020 to reverse that trend, as well as to start giving talks at conferences again. In general, several short stints over the past 5 years have really taken a toll, not to mention dealing with the combined and last effects of pneumonia and subsequent bouts of depression. Overall, as of last January, it seemed like 2020 would be the year to turn the page on some of these issues and begin getting myself back on-track. Little did I know how the year would unfold.

I don't know about you, but I am happy to see 2018 ended. Personally, it was a very difficult year, capping a very difficult decade. Now, as we embark into 2019, it's time to sit up and realize that we've now been in this world of e-commerce for more than 20 years (yes, really!). Many, many, many things have changed dramatically over that time, whether it be electronics (smartphones!) or communication (social media!) or transportation (electric vehicles!). However, one thing that really has not changed much is how businesses function, which is really quite sad if you think about it.

I started my security (post-sysadmin) career heavily focused on security policy frameworks. It took me down many roads, but everything always came back to a few simple notions, such as that policies were a means of articulating security direction, that you had to prescriptively articulate desired behaviors, and that the more detail you could put into the guidance (such as in standards, baselines, and guidelines), the better off the organization would be. Except, of course, that in the real world nobody ever took time to read the more detailed documents, Ops and Dev teams really didn't like being told how to do their jobs, and, at the end of the day, I was frequently reminded that publishing a policy document didn't translate to implementation.

Subsequently, I've spent the past 10+ years thinking about better ways to tackle policies, eventually reaching the point where I believe "less is more" and that anything written and published in a place and format that isn't "work as usual" will rarely, if ever, get implemented without a lot of downward force applied. I've seen both good and bad policy frameworks within organizations. Often they cycle around between good and bad. Someone will build a nice policy framework, it'll get implemented in a number of key places, and then it will languish from neglect and inadequate upkeep until it's irrelevant and ignored. This is not a recipe for lasting success.

Thinking about it further this week, it occurred to me that part of the problem is thinking in the old "compliance" mindset. Policies are really to blame for driving us down the checkbox-compliance path. Sure, we can easily stand back and try to dictate rules, but without the adequate authority to enforce them, and without the resources needed to continually update them, they're doomed to obsolescence. Instead, we need to move to that "security as code" mentality and find ways to directly codify requirements in ways that are naturally adapted and maintained.

There are shenanigans afoot, I tell ya; shenanigans!

I was recently contacted by an intermediary asking if I'd be interested in writing a paid blog post slamming analysts, to be published on my own blog site, and then promoted by the vendor. No real details were given other than the expectation to slam analyst firms, but once I learned who was funding the initiative, it became pretty clear what was going on. Basically, this vendor has received, or is about to receive, a less-than-stellar review and rating from one of the analyst firms and they're trying to get out in front of the news by trying to proactively discredit analyst reports.

My response to the offer was to decline, and now as I'm hearing some may take up the opportunity, I've decided it's time to myself get out ahead of this potential onslaught of misleading propaganda. Mind you, I'm not a huge fan of the analyst firms, and I found myself incredibly frustrated and disappointed during my time at Gartner when I was constantly told to write about really old and boring topics rather than being allowed to write more progressive reports that would actually help move the industry forward. But I'll get to that in a moment...

October was National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Since today is the last day, I figured now is as good a time as any to take a contrarian perspective on what undoubtedly many organizations just did over the past few weeks; namely, wasted a lot of time, money, and good will.

Anton Chuvakin and I were having a fun debate a couple weeks ago about whether incremental improvements are worthwhile in infosec, or if it's really necessary to "jump to the next curve" (phrase origin: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of Innovation," watch his TedX) in order to make meaningful gains in security practices. Anton even went so far as to write about it a little over a week ago (sorry for the delayed response - work travel). As promised, I feel it's important to counter his arguments a bit.

I have a pet peeve. Ok, I have several, but nonetheless, we're going to talk about one of them today. That pet peeve is security professionals wasting time and energy pushing a "security culture" agenda. This practice of talking about "security culture" has arisen over the past few years. It's largely coming from security awareness circles, though it's not always the case (looking at you anti-phishing vendors intent on selling products without the means and methodology to make them truly useful!).

I see three main problems with references to "security culture," not the least of which being that it continues the bad old practices of days gone by.

I recently had the privilege of attending BJ Fogg's Behavior Design Boot Camp. For those unfamiliar with Fogg's work, he started out doing research on Persuasive Technology back in the 90s, which has become the basis for most modern uses of technology to influence people (for example, use of Facebook user data to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election). The focus of the boot camp was around "behavior design," which was suggested to me by a friend who's a leading expert in modern, progress security awareness program management.

Thinking about how best to apply this new-found knowledge, I've been mulling opportunities for application of Fogg models and methods. Suddenly, it occurred to me, "Hey, you know what we really need is a new sub-field that combines all aspects of security behavior design, such as security awareness, anti-phishing, social engineering, and even UEBA." I concluded that maybe this sub-field would be called something like "behavioral security" and started doing searches on the topic.

Soul-crushing failure.

If asked, that is how I would describe the last 10 years of my career, since leaving AOL.

I made one mistake, one bad decision, and it's completely and thoroughly derailed my entire career. Worse, it's unclear if there's any path to recovery as failure piles on failure piles on failure.

In a moment of introspection last night, it occurred to me that working from home tends to amplify any perceived slight or sources of negativity. Most of my "human" interactions are online only, which - for this extrovert - means my energy is derived from whatever "interaction" I have online in Twitter, Facebook, email, Slack, etc.