Too Much of a Good Thing

Leave a comment June 10, 2020 Thom Langford

The one thing the current lockdown has taught me is that you really can eat too much chocolate… who knew?

Left to my own devices and without the distraction of a routine, regular work and people observing my unhealthy eating habits, my faulty brain tells me that more chocolate can only be a good thing and that I should continue to eat it until physical discomfort forces me to stop (in spite of my brain’s protestations.). It is an obsessive and compulsive behaviour that I recognise in myself, and do my best to contain, but it is a constant struggle arguing with myself that chocolate is not the most important thing in my life.

The same could be said to be true of many security professionals and their desire to roll out security practises to their organisations, implementing new procedures, standards, policies and ways of working that are designed to make the organisation very secure. They do this despite the protestations of the organisation itself telling them they have had enough, the new ways of working are too restrictive, difficult to follow and ultimately leave them with a security stomach ache.

This weeks Lost CISO episode talks about when too much security, like chocolate, is a bad thing.

This compulsion to think that security is the most important part of a business’ life is one that leads to users having security headaches all day and the business itself feeling slovenly, bloated and sluggish. (OK, that’s enough of the analogies.)

It is ultimately self-defeating, as users will do their best to work around draconian working practices, and the perception of a security organisation will be one of business prevention than vital service. I, and many others, have spoken about not being the department of “no”, but it goes well beyond just saying “yes”.

Agreeing to everything without thought of the consequences is potentially even more dangerous than saying no, especially in the short term. The vital distinction that needs to be made is that of a two way conversation between security and the end users and business. Finding out what is trying to be achieved is far more valuable than just focusing on what is being asked. Requests can be addressed in many different ways, not just by punching a whole in the firewall or switching off 2FA on the VPN, for instance.

In fact, this very conversation helps create even stronger relationships as it highlights two things:

How seriously you take their request.
How much you care about the organisation you both work for.

A great example of this in the above video is that of companies relaxing their security stance during the remote working ramp up of the lockdown. If the response was simply “no”, or even a straight “yes” with no consequences there would have been issues sooner or later. Working with the business, relaxing the standards for the initial growth and then methodically scaling and tightening the security once the initial growth is over is absolutely the right way to go.

So next time you feel yourself ~~reaching for the chocolate~~ wanting to say “no”, think beyond the the immediate consequences and how you can use security for the long term betterment of your organisation rather than your simple security stats.

And one bar of chocolate/security is always enough for everyone, right?

Do you need two re-align your security team to your business and don’t know where to start? (TL)2 Security has a proven track record helping security leaders and teams creat strtaegies and business plans that make real, competitive, differences to organisations. Contact (TL)2 to find out more.

Strategic Defense

Leave a comment June 3, 2020 Thom Langford

Most people who know me will understand when I say I am not technical in my field. Indeed, I have often spoken about how a CISO should not be technical; that doesn’t mean a CISO should not understand technology, but rather that is not the focus of the daily job. So what should a CISO focus on? I often talk about “Powerpoint and politics” and have even heard that expanded to …” and people” which makes sense really. Interestingly though, I used to say it as a joke, and then it came true. Huh.

This weeks video from The Lost CISO series talks about how to build a strategy. Or rather, it talks about how to build the platform upon which to build your strategy. One of the biggest mistakes I see organisations and CISO’s make is thinking that a security strategy comes from the roadmap of projects they will be rolling out over the next 1-3-5 years. Sure, they may feed into a strategy, but they play a small part of it.

Building a strategy requires knowing where you want to go, and what you are supporting. Essentially, it is a vision of the future, so no surprises for guessing that you start with a Vision statement. If, like me from 10 years ago, thought a Vision Statement was a way for expensive pony-tailed consultants to charge thousands a day to simply tell you to “strive to support our customers in a meaningful manner”, you may baulk at this starting point. Fully understandable, but also cynical, and let’s not allow past bad experiences taint our new approach.

The reason I say this is not because I have a ponytail, expensive or otherwise, but rather because a vision is effectively a rallying point around which your security team can focus on. If they do not know what they are working towards, you and your team will be in a perpetual state of fire fighting and reactive work. It doesn’t matter how many projects you have in place, or roadmaps printed nicely on A0 on the design teams plotter; if you don’t know what you are working towards how do you know if you are succeeding?

Make sure you know what the company vision is as well, otherwise you might create one that is pulling in the opposite direction, which helps no-one. Thom’s Top Tip: If you can create a security vision without the word “security” in it, you will definitely be on the right track (although this is by no means mandatory). Your vision, therefore, may look a little like this:

Delivering competitive advantage through trust and transparency.

It’s pretty high-level, doesn’t mention security, and gives people on the team some key pointers on how to consciously modify their behaviour towards a common goal.

But a Vision by itself isn’t enough, you also need some business outcomes to be achieved in order to achieve this Vision. Think of 3-5 or so outcomes that you want to achieve in order to fulfil your Vision, then add a metric (how you know it is being achieved) and an outcome (what benefit does it bring?). You then have one element of your 3-5 business outcomes that allow you to plan work, focus resources and (you will be glad to hear) add to your roadmap. So, for example, here is a business outcome, metric and value in support of the above Vision:

Business Outcome: Frictionless and scalable business processes.
Metric: Higher quality and faster outcomes.
Value: Standardisation resulting in increased efficiencies including easier decision making and better use of time, effort and money.

Add some more like this, and you have a robust vision upon which to build your strategy. Now you can think about how you are going to be doing that because you now have a better idea of what you need to do to achieve the company goals, what resources you need (including skills), and more importantly how you want to shape the future of your security team, and more importantly, your organisation. The whole point of a strategy is to ensure that your future is not an inevitability you have no control over, but rather you can invent it to be what you want and need it to be.

Looking to take your security team to the next level of productivity and business engagement? (TL)2 Security can help you define, establish and operationalise your strategy and vision ensuring you go beyond just keeping the lights on, and actually providing competitive advantage to your business. Contact us to find out more.

The Runners and Riders of Lockdown

Leave a comment May 7, 2020 Thom Langford

After over six weeks of some kind of lockdown here in the UK, and similar amounts of time elsewhere in the world, it has become very obvious to me that many companies out there are simply ill-equipped to deal with the change in lifestyle the lockdown demands.

By ill-equipped, I don’t just mean from a technology perspective, although we see some of that as companies reduce security requirements to get users online from home. What I mean is that culturally they are not equipped to deal not only with a workforce that needs to work remotely but also a market that is doing the same. Put simply; companies are struggling to re-gear their sales and marketing departments to this brave new world we find ourselves.

I say this because as an industry we are used to a plethora of in-person events happening where vendors can either have stalls displaying their latest products, or stages where carefully polished presentations and panels are put on for us to watch, learn and hopefully decide to buy their product from. Webinars and online events were there but were the distant, impoverished, uglier cousin of something live, in-person and your face. Indeed, just a few weeks before the lockdown I was at RSA Conference in San Francisco, where the very epitome of what I describe was played out for the world to see.*

Then suddenly, it all stopped. Conferences and shows were cancelled, events postponed indefinitely, and in many cases, the security product landscape just stopped. I understand why, in many cases, cash flow needed to be conserved in these unprecedented times. However, it very quickly became apparent that this was the new normal, and that the companies that didn’t embrace it would quickly become irrelevant. after all, if you can’t adapt to a few weeks of disruption, what kind of company are you, delivering products to an industry that needs to plan for disruption?

I watched “Have I Got News For you” in those first few weeks on the BBC, a topical panel show comprised of 5 people, and they did it by having the guests record from their homes.

Have I Got News For You, March 2020

It was different, the dynamic was… a little off… but the show went ahead, the jokes landed, and each subsequent show got better. In other words, the BBC just got on with it, embraced the change, and made it work.

The same needs to happen to many of the security vendors, as unfortunately, it is a case of remaining relevant throughout the lockdown, in the front of people’s minds, and showing that they can overcome adversity by delivering knowledge and information. Those that don’t do it, retract into their proverbial shells and wait for “normality” to return will suffer.

Also, let us assume that normality does return, whatever form that might take. Those that have embraced these alternative Zoom/Skype/Teams/Hangouts/whatever approaches may find they are just as valuable as in-person events and can operate both, side by side, now unconstrained by the lockdown and able to use film and audio in even more creative ways. Which company would you choose to work with in the future, the one who sat tight, and did little market outreach during the lockdown, or the company that continued to communicate with their clients and potential clients through different mediums, sometimes getting it wrong but continually innovating and improving. Which company has the better culture?

It isn’t even a matter of cost. The LinkedIn Live, Zoom, Webinar etc. technologies already existed and were invested in, just woefully underutilised.

The same argument also applies to work from home, as many organisations now realise that productivity isn’t hours sat at the office desk, but rather results. Which organisation/manager would you want to work for? The one that never changes or the culturally adaptive one that is based on results and trust?

These are challenging times, but these are the times that are going to show many companies in their true light, and you can use this time to differentiate between them.

*I do love a good conference, and the benefits they bring to my peers and me are fabulous, in case you think I am biased against them.

Your InfoSec premiums have increased by 20% this year. Are we worth it?

Leave a comment June 22, 2015 Thom Langford

My annual home insurance quote came through this morning, with the usual 10-20% uplift that I know I can remove again through simply phoning the provider and threatening to leave. It is a pretty standard technique in the industry that has been going on for years, and that preys upon the lazy people in the world who can’t be bothered to look for a better deal.

Rewind a few months when I spoke with a very senior executive who admitted that he saw information security as a form of insurance.

“I don’t want to have to pay for it, but I do because I know that when I need it you guys come and fix the problems we are in”

This is a somewhat common and fair attitude to information security given our background as an industry and how we often interact with the business (a particularly large topic that this entire blog is really about). yet what was so interesting was his follow on comment:

“the things is, I am sure there is so much more information security can do for us, I just don’t know what it is”

When I first took out home insurance, I was most concerned about getting the cheapest quote. I was young, free and almost single, but all of the extras that the larger insurance companies were offering (and charging for) did not concern me. If my house burnt down I would find somewhere else to live while the insurance company sorted everything out, what do I need a hotel for? Lost my house keys? I will change the crappy lock on the front door myself when I get round to it, I don’t need a locksmith from the insurance company to do it for me.

Fast forward to today, and I live a far more complex busy life, cash rich (relatively speaking), time poor, with responsibilities to my children and wife, and a lifetime of memories in my house that are virtually irreplaceable. if things go wrong, I need it fixed quickly and easily and with the minimum of impact to me and my family. I even have proactive services, such as boiler cover and servicing to reduce the likelihood of things going wrong in the first place. Therefore I am leveraging every aspect of what the insurance company can give me even before something goes wrong, and the peace of mind that I get knowing they are looking out for me even prior to disaster striking is worth (almost!) every penny.

An information security programme must be able to sell every aspect of its services to the business, and not just be seen as a reactionary force. if it does that, every time something goes wrong, both the financial and emotional premiums of paying for your services will increase time over time until the point the programme is seen as imply an overhead like paying the rent and keeping the plant watered, i.e. when the time comes, costs to be reduced.

Look at how you provide service before the fact; risk assessments, security testing, awareness and education can all be seen as services that prevent and/or add value to the business. What about the day to day? Consultancy to the business to do things securely without them even thinking about it; it doesn’t have to have “security” written on it to be a win for you and the business. And of course don’t forget after the event; incident management, business continuity, or even helping in the quality acceptance environments after something has been developed.

The key is to be involved in the full lifecycle of your business, whatever they are. They will be different from business to business and industry to industry, so it may not always be easy to identify, but it is extremely valuable.

And the prices we quote every year? Unlike insurance premiums, we are worth every penny.

Note: I don’t actually like the analogy of infosec and insurance, but it is one I regularly hear, so I decided to try and embrace it in this blog. I still don’t like it, but I can see how it could be useful for a simple elevator pitch or short conversation. There are plenty of analogies out there, and the best place for them in my humble opinion is at The Analogies Project. Check them out, and use them wherever possible. Even better, think about becoming a contributor.

The Consistency of Plastique

Leave a comment June 17, 2015 Thom Langford

As I said in my last post I have been travelling quite extensively recently, but this weekend I was able to take a long weekend in Oslo with my wife just before the Nordic CSA Summit where I was invited to speak on “the CISO Perspective”. As a gift for speaking, each of us was given a block of Norwgian cheese, in a roughly square shape, that really did seem to have the consistancy, weight and look of a lump of plastique (I imagine…). It did occur to me that in the spirit of all good 44CON prizes, it was intended to get you stopped at the airport.

On my return home yesterday, I was pret sure my bag would be picked up for secondary screening given the presence of this lump of cheesy explosive in my bag (although apparently @digininja tells me a malt loaf has the same effect as well). Sure enough, my bag was selected, I presented to the good natured security folks the block of cheese, and with a wry smile they let my bag through. The same could not be said of my carry on bag though.

I was asked quite curtly if I had a penknife or similar in this bag; now I am getting more forgetful, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t. The security guy really did not look like he believed me, so we started to empty my bag. Then I remembered, I had a pick lock set that I had put into zipped pocket in my bag about nine months ago, intending to give it to my good friend Akash in Boston who had expressed an interest in that particular art. Remember I just said I am getting forgetful? That’s why it has been in my bag for so long having seen Akash many times this last nine months. Oh well.

But it also occurred to me that I had been through about ten different airports in that time, and this was the first time it had been picked up, let alone even identified as a possible penknife (understandable as the picks fold into the main body).

This underscores to me the inconsistency of the security scanning at virtually every airport. Shoes on or off? Belts on or off? IPads as well as laptops taken out? Kindles, in the bag or out? My bag of cables that you tell me to keep in my bag at one airport, and then getting admonished for not pulling it out of the bag at the next? As an end user of these services (and I am fully supportive of them despite this I must say) it is extremely frustrating. There seem to be too many exceptions in place without clear reason, and without tying back to a singular way of doing things. The shoe bomber, Richard Reid, saw to it we have to take our shoes off going through security… except of course when you don’t.

Consistency in an information security programme is obviously key. But sometimes the pendulum swings too far the other way. Any policy that ends with “There are no exceptions to this policy” is asinine at best, and crippling to the business at worst. There will always be a need for an exception in order to ensure business can be carried out effectively. As long as the risks are understood and communicated effectively, then move on and do it.

It certainly doesn’t mean that the exception can be used as an excuse to carry on working like that. There is no concept of precedence in this case. If there was the natural end state would be complete mayhem as every exception is used to the point where there is no policy left. An exception is just what it says on the tin, a one off easing off the rules for business to to operate effectively and efficiently. It should be time based, must be reviewed regularly, and where possible repealed if alternative approaches have come to light.

Consistency is important when applying policies, especially across a large organisation, but for goodness sake, don’t forget that change is an important part of business and needs to be embraced. But please do a better job of managing that change, and the subsequent exceptions, than airport security does.

Conferences and Presentations

What with InfoSec Europe, BSides, RSA Unplugged and the just attended Nordic CSA Summer conference it has been busy on the presentation front again. I have a few more presentation to upload to this site as well as some footage. I am hoping to make it to Blackhat in Vegas for the first time this year, and speak on behalf of friendly vendor who I have always enjoyed working with.

Diligently preparing for the conference

As I also mentioned in my last post, my employer became a sponsor of the European Security Blogger Awards, something I hope we will be for future events as well. Unfortunately I lost my best personal blogger award crown this year to Lee Munson of Security faq’s. I can’t help but feel that if I have to lose to someone, Lee would be top of my list as he consistently outshines me in both quality and volume of blogging. As a community we are lucky to have someone like Lee and if you haven’t already done so please do reach out to him and congratulate him.