From Paris With Love; the oncoming storm of the generational gap

Leave a comment April 15, 2013 Thom Langford

The media has been awash with stories about Paris Brown, the UK’s first youth police and crime commissioner who felt she had no option to resign even before formally taking up her post as a result of allegedly offensive messages she had posted on Twitter.

To many, she had done nothing wrong; here was a teenager who was simply testing and pushing the boundaries of her adolescent world, sharing views and comments in her private life in an attempt to learn, identify with and grow into an adult. She had been chosen from a large number of candidates for this role precisely because she was typical of many of her peers, and her views of the world and the society she lived in, warts and all, were almost a requirement of the role in the first place.

To others, she was demonstrating vulgar and offensive sensibilities in a public domain that have no place in a role in public office. To that end Kent Police are currently reviewing the tweets in question so ascertain if a case should be made against her.

I believe this is going to be the thin end of the wedge, and that many more instances of issues like this will come through over the coming years. This is going to have, in my opinion, a number of ramifications in our industry in a number of areas:

BYOD. The adoption of smartphones across society combined with bring your own device policies across industries has meant that the boundaries between personal and professional life are becoming increasingly blurred. This blurring means that people will increasingly lose the definition between what can and can’t be shared from the workplace which is going to become an issue. Sharing confidential documents via a BYOD enabled smartphone to personal accounts so they can be worked from home is not going to be seen as an issue; the content is on “my” device after all. Tweeting or blogging about activities from the workplace is increasingly the norm, even if those activities are confidential or secret. Even the acronym NSFW, not safe for work, has evolved to identify what content may or not be suitable for viewing and sharing in the workplace (how else can I get the time to view all of this awesome content?). As quickly as NSFW has come about I predict it’s demise as these boundaries crumble and fall and anything and everything will be considered as acceptable to view at work as long as it is on “my device”.

Privacy vs Personal. There has been a growing trend amongst recruiters to look at the social media profiles of potential candidates. There is nothing illegal or unethical in this per se, although even standard police employment checks for the kind of role Paris Brown was entering into don’t specifically call out the need for social media checks/reviews. This is the dichotomy of the situation; how can I expect privacy when I do not observe it with my company data, and yet posting my weekends antics to my friends should remain with my friends, and yet this is the very real expectation it seems. How long will it be before this crashing realisation for a generation of people that what they have done in their adolescent years as they grew up really wasn’t just between friends but between the whole world, and put them at a distinct disadvantage in the job market? And will this realisation bring a raft of legislation along the lines of age discrimination, that disallows the use of this information during interview? There have already been cases of prospective employers in the US asking for Facebook credentials of candidates in order to check their backgrounds. Whilst this does cross moral, ethical and professional lines in many of our books, this is the inevitable alternative if this legislation doesn’t come in. As an infosec industry we will be on the front line of educating people of these consequences and potentially enforcing any incoming legislation in the workplace.

Professionalism in our Industry. But what about the here and now? As a profession we are held to a high standard of professional standards and ethics. All the organisations that we affiliate ourselves with to one extent or another have clear professional ethics. If during the recruitment process you have an opportunity to review somebodies social media background, would you take it? How would you use that information, and to what extent would a checkered social life influence your decisions? There are two sides to this of course; do your professional ethics stop you from looking (or just taking action from them), but then again would you want someone who appears to display a lack of self control and publicly put themselves into position of vulnerability that may allow them to be more easily bribed or blackmailed in an area that demands high levels of security and trust?

This generational gap in appreciation of the long lasting impacts of current social media in the world of big data is an area I believe is yet to be addressed fully. The sociological impacts of a series of younger generations engaging with an always on culture of social media are not yet fully understood and should be explored further. I hope the above is dipping a toe in the water of this huge body of water. Ultimately, if you are not paying for it, you are not the customer; you are the product…

EU Security Blogger Awards 2013

Leave a comment April 13, 2013 Thom Langford

It is not often I am inspired enough to write a post at the breakfast table, let alone on a Saturday, but that is exactly what is happening now. Brian Honan (@brianhonan) just this morning announced the opening of the EU Security Blogger Awards voting.
I had taken the time last week to vote for the nominees for this award as I felt strongly that while there is a strong infosec community in Europe we rarely shout about the fact. I also noticed that many of the blogs and twitter feeds I follow are USA based; nothing wrong with that per se, but as a result I was losing a certain element of relevance in my reading, education and therefore understanding about the issues that affect us in the industry, and specifically in the EU.
With Brian’s announcement I duly voted and todays announcement is the result of that process, namely the nominations for the awards. As a result of this however two wonderful things have come about; firstly, I have been given a rich seam of bloggers and tweeters to follow! This is like being given free textbooks at school, or a free subscription to your favourite infosec magazine. I fully intend to tap this source of information to its fullest extent in the coming weeks.
Secondly, I was both amazed and honoured to have been nominated in the category of Best Personal Security Blog! This is a tremendous surprise and somewhat daunting given the company I am keeping in this category. I am all the more humbled by the fact that this nomination was made possible because of people voting; to those of you who gave your unsolicited vote for me to be in this category, I thank you.
So I would urge all of you who read this to not only look at the nominations at the above link to see who else is out here in the EU blogging space, but also to vote and really underscore the fact that the EU blogging community is large, noisy, vibrant, informed, opinionated and above all active in the information security community. Your cheques will be in the post shortly.

RANT Panel Debate: “Should You Train Your Users on Security Awareness?”

Leave a comment March 29, 2013 Thom Langford

I spent last night with five eloquent, passionate and above all opinionated colleagues arguing the pros and cons of security awareness training. We were doing this at the monthly Acumin RANT forum to a packed crowd who, as always, were not shy in holding back on their opinions.

The Crowd, who make RANT what it is!

We had two stand ins replacing Christian Toon and Kai Roer in the form of Bernadette Palmer and Andrew Agnes both of whom bought a huge amount of experience, opinion and humour to the evening. The lineup therefore was:

For:

(The Award Winning) Javvad Malik, @j4vv4d

Bernadette Palmer

Andrew Agnes @sirjester

Against:

Myself

Geordie Stewart

Rowenna Fielding @infosecgeeklady

We did a standard pre vote just before starting (we garnered no votes and a lot of good natured laughs as expected!) and then we went straight into the standard For and Against cycle with me kicking off. Nobody had briefed me (or perhaps I hadn’t listened…) that we were reducing our standard six minutes each down to three! A quick reshuffle in my head and we were off. The photos may look like I am singing Karaoke, but beneath the entertaining exterior was my serious message!

I have posted my core arguments to this blog before so I won’t rehash them here again but what followed over the next eighty minutes was hugely interactive, passionate, thought provoking and hilarious! With a few dongle and fork gags thrown in this debate had everything! Of course there was no real conclusion but at the closing vote there was a small but very definite swing in our favour, hooray!

The Karaoke King!

What I found the most interesting however was that on the whole our arguments converged; we all acknowledged that information security training as it stands now is simply not working. What we do with it however, was where the real debate lay. Do you throw the whole lot out and start form scratch or do you continue to try and fix what we have? I think this is the dilemma we need to face up to sooner rather than later in the industry, once of course we accept that our training programs don’t work. That part is where the industry needs the most help.

I normally try and stay around after these kinds of events and listen to other peoples opinions, gather feedback and generally mingle. Tonight however I had dinner with a few folks (@jimshout, @j4vv4d, @sirjester, @jee2uu) to discuss an upcoming project. More on that in the next few months but it was a productive and exciting evening overall.

Finally, there was some footage taken of the evening by Gemma of Acumin; like all my footage if it ever sees the light of day I will get it posted here as soon as possible! As always a huge thank you to Gemma, Simon, Chris et al from Acumin for not only making this happen but asking me to be a part of it.

Andrew Agnes

Geordie Stewart

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

1 Comment March 29, 2013 Thom Langford

Originally attributed to Mark Twain, who subsequently attributed it to Benjamin Disreali (although no evidence has been found that he actually said it), the above quote sums up how the use of statistics can blur the lines between powerful argument supporter and simple use of numbers to confuse and deceive.

When used properly, statistics in your risk management programme help support your recommendations, allow you to build effective business cases and even allow for a certain amount of self-analysis and performance reporting. When used badly, you run the risk of undermining the credibility of your entire risk management programme.

Consider the following two statements made by security awareness training companies:

“Reduce phishing click-throughs by 75%!”

KnowBe4 Internet Security Awareness Training

“…successfully trained over 7000 employees” (Fox Entertainment)

TerraNova Security Awareness

In the first instance there is a bold claim in that click-through rates reduce by 75% which on the face of it sounds great. When reading in details there are some more impressive results but I can’t help thinking of the somewhat artificial nature of the test, i.e. “I have just taken anti phishing training and I am suddenly getting five phishing type emails, hmmmmmm”. Perhaps a more suitable test would have been to wait two months before sending the test emails? (The time between training and testing is unfortunately not specified however). There was also no mention of any feedback given in between each test. Security awareness training is such a hot topic however that I will leave that well alone for now!

In the second case the banner across the top of the website proudly announces how many people have been successfully trained; unfortunately it makes no mention of the other 5,500 employes who were not trained in Fox Entertainment (headcount checked at 12,500).

Now this is just standard sales patter and I certainly don’t mean to pick on these two companies specifically, but both statements illustrate the point perfectly. In both cases the products are probably very good in their own field, but when you “reverse” what it is they are saying they speak volumes. Some foods for instance are labelled as 90% fat-free, but in reality that means they contain 10% fat, and so here therefore there is still a 25% sized group of people who did click through and there are still 5,500 people who were not trained (and why not?). This is related to the fear, uncertainty and doubt that is often touted in the industry and can be used to scare and subsequently encourage people to buy products.

As risk professionals we need to take a more balanced, calmer route. We need to use statistics more carefully and responsibly, especially when what it is we are presenting makes its way into the core of the business, the leadership, the board, and ends up being used to make business decisions with serious implications. We can’t take sales statistics for instance on face value and use them to recommend a product or emphasise a point.

A Google search of “risk management statistics” produces over a billion results (in of itself a bad and useless statistic to present) so there is plenty of work out there on how to present your work, so I won’t be suggesting anything specific here. There are also plenty of other issues with statistics, for instance causation and inference which can be looked at in more detail at a later date.

i will however close on three key points I use whenever I am producing statistics for anything that comes out of the data gathered by a risk management programme:

“Reverse” the statistic (see above). If you don’t like what you see, don’t use it.
Be careful of your sample size; too small and the statistics are meaningless, too big and the resulting statistic you are focussing on is still a big and scary number even though you are potentially trying to emphasise quite the reverse.
Look at what you come up with cynically; is it a lie, or a damn lie?

And to underscore how statistics can mess with your head, statistically there are six Popes per square mile in the Vatican; go figure.

Getting Your Hands Dirty

1 Comment March 21, 2013 Thom Langford

In my last post I referred to ensuring that your risk management programme is producing the quality of output to ensure the business information it feeds into is of the highest quality; maintaining the integrity of your programme.

If there is one thing that can be done to improve the integrity of your risk assessments it is simply to get your hands dirty during them. I have had a number of conversations with people who have been on the receiving end of an assessment where the assessor simply sits at the table and asks for evidence in the form of documentation, verbal responses or even just PowerPoint presentations to confirm the effectiveness of the information security programme in question. Personally I have sat in a conference room for one or two days at a time and only left the room for a short thirty minute ‘walkabout’. Quite how the assessor felt they were getting a representative view of what we were doing was beyond me.

There are a number of problems with this hands off approach:

The ability of those being assessed to ‘play’ the assessor increases with their reluctance to physically move around the organisation. Pre-prepared evidences (the so called “audit box” as was once described to me) can be made available, the organisations SME’s can be wheeled in to ensure the right things are said at the right time and the people who never seem able to say the right thing at the right time (and every organisation has them!) can be told to work in a different building that day.

Secondly, unless the assessor is actually looking at the evidence first hand, even down to rifling through the physical pieces of paper or reviewing server logs, there is absolutely no way any kind of discrepancy will ever be found. Of course this is a sampling exercise, and of course there is no way every single piece of evidence, paper or electronic can be reviewed, but some kind of benefit can be gleaned from going though them. Quite apart form anything else it gives the clear impression that “no stone is unturned” during the assessment process. I have come up with a surprising number of findings from simply taking a few minutes to look through large piles of paper records.

Finally, and perhaps slightly more esoterically, the action of a walkabout can give a very good “feel” for a place. If the presence of the auditor brings hurried and furtive glances everywhere they go, it may give the indication of nervousness or unwillingness regarding the assessment (or of course just a healthy distrust of strangers). If there are rows of empty desks that are obviously normally in use but seem to be vacated for the day this may give the indication that special plans have been laid on for the assessment (or that the sales team are in a meeting). This last point is not so clear cut as the other two, and should only be used as an indicator of what is already coming out of your assessment, but it is a useful one nonetheless.

I have a colleague who every time he enters a “serious” meeting, he undoes his cufflinks and rolls up his cuffs a couple of times; this is his way of mentally preparing for the challenge ahead by literally rolling up his sleeves. When it comes to risk assessments that is exactly what you need to do, and then prepare yourself to get your hands dirty.