Taking Care of Business

Leave a comment May 24, 2023 Thom Langford

I remember back in early 1996 arriving home from work and telling the future ex Mrs Langford that was going to be very busy “for the next two to three months”. There was a project going on that I decided I was going to get involved in (outside of my normal IT Manager day job) and that it was going to be good for my career. In modern parlance, I had decided to “lean in”.

Those busy two to three months ended for me on the 10th September 2017. I had pushed myself professionally as hard as I could, burnt the candle at both ends, worked long hours, was only off work sick when I euphemistically “called in dead”, accrued millions of air miles, and was ostensibly successful in my career. Without wishing to dwell here on the events of that fateful night/morning in September 2017, I had reached the end of the line; all of that work and effort had ultimately netted my severe anxiety and stress, diabetes, alcoholism, and a desire to make it all stop very violently.

All of which brings us neatly to right now. I am currently off work sick. I’m very likely to head back tomorrow 9even though I am not 100%, but boredom is a keen medicine sometimes), but I have had the best part of five working days of, plus a weekend in between. I had been feeling under the weather for about a week or so beforehand, but at about midday on my first day off I decided to just switch off my computer and go to bed, and there I more or less stayed for the best part of a week. I had tested positive for COVID, but a few days later that was now negative and I still felt like a bag of rusty spanners had taken residence in my lungs, and my energy levels were depleting like a Death Star tractor beam. Looks like I worked through a second bout of COVID and then got taken down by another virus; but those are details for me and my GP and work HR I guess.

But “SO WHAT?!” I hear you cry? Well, throughout these last few days of being off I made a conscious effort to disconnect from work as much as possible and focus on my recovery. I learnt my lesson those few years back, and realised I needed to get myself back to fitness, despite the many pressing deadlines and meetings I was missing, and the importance of the work I was doing. I focussed on myself and my health as I knew I don’t want to go back too early and jeopardise not only my health but my work performance.

And you know what? Despite everything I had experience before and told myself, I still felt guilty about taking the time out.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, anywhere though, not least the information security industry. A few weeks ago, my good friend and all round good chap Sarb Sembhi, who along with Peter Olivier and Paul Simms authored a paper on Mental Health in Cyber Security, and of which I was asked to peer review. I will leave you to read the paper yourself, but the figures in there are both unsurprising as well as making for uncomfortable reading regarding anxiety, depression, anger, alcoholism etc..

I was asked by a client over dinner recently “what keeps you up at night?”. Obviously they were fishing for gossip/insight into the state of our joint business, but I told them that basically nothing does because after my life changing experience back in 2017, I refuse to get stressed or anxious over work matters because it simply isn’t worth it, especially as I am not CISO for something that may save/take lives. And yet here I am feeling guilty about taking maybe another day off sick, and deciding to go back even though I am still not breathing right and feeling fatigued. Surely I should know better?!

To be clear, we are (normally) compensated well and a have privileged positions at work to get the job done properly; we have responsibilities to our colleagues and to the clients and markets we support to do the right job and put the effort in, and frankly most of us even enjoy our jobs. But I can absolutely guarantee you that none of that is worth anxiety, depression, anger, diabetes, alcoholism and suicidal tendencies if that pressure to perform is maintained indefinitely.

Taking care of business ultimately means taking care of yourself first.

I am going to be at InfoSecurity Europe in a few weeks time on stage with the Sarb and Peter, authors of the above mentioned Mental Health in Cyber Security paper.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

What Exactly is the Cyber Scheme?

Solving today’s Security Challenges With Device Centric SSE

Sneaky Tricks In Enterprise Pricing

You, Me, and Dystopia

Leave a comment May 16, 2023 Thom Langford

We all remember the Ocean’s 11 styles of antics that criminals can emulate to gain access to IoT devices and, subsequently, the enterprise network on which they are hosted. It may have been an isolated incident, but it underscores that ANY vulnerability can be exploited.

The question of “why should we be bothered now?” begs to be answered, given that these risks have been around for a long time. But, interestingly, the 2020 COVID lockdown (and subsequent ones) and the impacts it had on the supply chain may help us to answer this question with surprising clarity.

Do you remember how difficult it was to get hold of toilet paper, pasta and hand gel in March of 2020? Panic buying meant that the supply chain struggled to meet demand; combined with the “just in time” supply models employed by most manufacturers and retailers, stocks were diminished quickly with no replenishment in sight. So far, so what, right?

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, there are well over 8,000 small to medium sized food suppliers in the UK (probably exacerbated by the gig economy as well). How many companies of this size do you know of that have a robust cybersecurity programme in place?

This puts them at a significant disadvantage when it comes to recognising a cyber-attack and defending against it. Given the fish tank scenario from my last blog, it is no stretch of the imagination to see circumstances whereby chilled and perishable goods are sabotaged and destroyed, either in situ or in transit. Remote monitoring is rapidly becoming the norm and will reduce costs and effort, something any small business would jump at. So protecting these environments, the sensors, and the control devices from the get-go becomes critical.

The incentives to disrupt and destroy the supply chains are sometimes manifest, but only occasionally. Terrorism, both domestic and international, will always try and attack a nation’s weakest point. But there are other threats to consider as well.

The (fairly) recent global lockdowns and various actions carried out by governments worldwide have changed the business and planetary ecosystem, and not always for the better. Without commenting on the politics of the situations themselves, activism has been on the rise globally, with people taking to the streets to defend their particular viewpoints and air their grievances.

The hacker group, Anonymous, are the epitome of so-called “hacktivism”, using their collective skills to disrupt and expose governments and corporations. Their particular flavour of activism involves attacking their targets and exploiting their weaknesses for political and social leverage. So again, it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see these current troubling times being a catalyst for more hacktivism, attacking vulnerable supply chains through their reliance on IoT technology.

The positive impact of technology always needs to be balanced against the sociological and cultural impractical it may have, as well as the environment in which it operates. With the commoditisation of security testing capabilities and offensive technological tools, the ability to attack and exploit weaknesses in the supply chain becomes open to the general populace. If that populace suffers a more significant division of wealth and disenfranchisement, the risk of the supply chain being attacked is greater.

Ocean’s 11 suddenly becomes The Hunger Games; the implications of an insecure supply chain vulnerable to attack can have severe consequences for what we consider to be our ‘normal’ lives. So taking precautions now to protect our society’s lifelines must be imperative.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

Introducing Cyber Advisor

BSidesAustin 2023: CyberSecurity In The Texas Tech Capital

Understanding ‘Lone Wolf’ Attacks Dissecting and Modeling 2022’s Most Powerful Cyber Attacks

Beer, PowerPoint and Politics

Leave a comment May 8, 2023 Thom Langford

Gone are the days when being a CISO (or even just ‘the security guy/gal’) was about actual information security or IT security. Even the term IT Security is outdated now and emphasises a one-dimensional view of what security is really about. However, I digress…

The Information Security element of CISO is correct, but for various reasons, the CISO’s role is very different from what it was a decade ago. The role then required a strong technologist who understood the firewalls, their rules, the cryptographic controls and even how to code hotfixes on the fly. This isn’t surprising given the role almost wholly came from an IT background; after all, back in the day, mere lip service was paid to the human element, and the legal considerations were considered simply “someone else’s job”.

I was often asked what my job as a CISO entailed, and because I didn’t initially understand what I had actually got myself in for when I took on my first CISO job I used to jokingly say;

PowerPoint and politics
Me. Back Then.

The odd thing is that this response is not far from the truth. My role became significantly less about my understanding of specific niches of information security knowledge and more about putting across to the business what this information security lot was all about and how it helped the company stay competitive, out of trouble or even just in business. The more I was doing this, the more I was embroiled in the day-to-day machinations of how a business works and the inescapable conclusion I came to was this; even if information security is seen as essential to the business, it is still just one voice of many that are trying to influence, cajole and be heard.

Moreover, this is where the politics come in, unfortunately. It is human nature and the way of businesses around the world. Politics is everywhere, and any CISO who doesn’t see and at least understand what is going on is, at best, going to be ignored and, at worst, eaten alive.

Which brings me to my second quote from me (well, it makes attribution a whole lot easier, doesn’t it?);

The purpose of a CISO is not to make the company more secure per se, but rather to help it sell more beer/widgets, increase shareholder value (as appropriate), and let the business make risky decisions more easily… through the judicious use of security
Me, Just now. Again.

The CISO should not be concerned with the name on the front of the firewall or the specifics of the latest penetration test. Instead, they should focus on how best to align their security services to the business and ensure security isn’t just a cost centre but a capability that allows teams and the company to run faster, more efficiently, and with less risk.

That doesn’t take technical knowledge; that takes strategic and business knowledge.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

Shift Gears: How to Leverage Data-Centric Security Controls in AWS

Changes to the OWASP API Security Top Ten 2019 to 2023

Cybersecurity as an Operational Effort

When It All Goes Pete Tong…

Leave a comment April 26, 2023 Thom Langford

Murphy’s Law states:

“If something can go wrong, it will go wrong”

Many CISOs will also state:

“it is not a case of if you have been breached, but rather that you have, you just don’t know it yet”

Depressing as both statements sound by themselves, put them together, and you enter into a worldview of doom and gloom from which it is hard to crawl. It doesn’t matter what you do; there will always be a breach and multiple mistakes in your team. These factors create a perfect storm for finding a new job relatively quickly.

But there is hope that when you start a new role or join a new company, there is one thing that needs to be in place before anything else; the Incident Management Plan*. In all but the most security mature organisations, any improvements put into place by you will take months and years to bear fruit, during which time a disaster can strike without notice (the unknown unknowns hitting at an unknown time, if you will.) So making sure you have a plan to fall back on at a moment’s notice gives you space and time to respond appropriately while still being able to focus on the more fundamental changes you have in mind for the organisation.

But what to put into these plans? There are a few key points that should always be adhered to whenever writing a response plan;

Keep it Simple

Human beings are emotional sacks of meat and adrenalin when things go wrong. They can simultaneously be forgetful, angry, scared, sad, and even stupid. Therefore your plans, and by association, your writing and grammar, need to be as simple as possible. It’s not an easy task and will require many edits, reviews and rewrites, but simplicity is your friend during a confusing and rapidly changing situation.

Keep it Flexible

Extending the first point, you also cannot create a prescriptive document. If you define every action based on a specific input, your plan will fail when that particular input isn’t happening. The plan needs to work on the principles of what must occur during an incident rather than the specifics of what needs to be done. It is useful, for instance, to focus on roles and responsibilities rather than activities; in this way, someone is accountable for “public communications”; how they achieve that is up to them, but the plan does not define it.

Know What’s Important

This is another way of saying, “Understand your critical services”. These services could be technology-based, process focussed or even role/person-specific. During an incident, the immediate focus is to get the bare minimum of services/capabilities/business operating again as quickly and safely as possible. Going back to Business As Usual is for later on. You need to know what the bare minimum is to achieve it.

The ISO 22301:2019 – Security & Resilience – Business continuity management systems standard is a great place to start to understand the mechanics of this element in more detail (and great for this topic as a whole).

Collaborate While Creating

It never ceases to amaze me how often plans like this get created in isolation across companies, divisions and departments. What that means, more often than not, is a competition for resources because they all assume they will have exclusive access to the resources required to see them through a crisis just because they have a plan.

Ideally, there should be a single master plan for the organisation that allows each discrete business area to manage their plans (essential in larger organisations). Then, all of these plans and their requirements are fed back into the overarching strategy to carry out capacity planning and coordination more effectively and efficiently.

Multi-channel Sharing and Education

This is the one time I will permit using a few trees to print out your plans. Electronic documents are still valuable and should be saved in different formats and on other devices and platforms (for redundancy, obvs). Having paper copies of the entire document, in addition to aide memoirs, laminated “cheat sheets”, credit card numbers and any other creative approaches to ensuring the needed information is always available. Remember, this is a time of crisis; your laptop may be burning down with your building, and your phone may be out of battery with nowhere to charge. Base your communication and distribution methods on the assumption of Murphy’s Law above.

Test the Plan, Learn and Review

You must test the plan as much as possible, especially when creating it. If you feel brave enough, you can have a tabletop walkthrough or pull the plug on a data centre. Some third-party services allow you to test your plan in a virtual space using specialised communications tools that are even more realistic. Whatever the case, every time you check it, review it and feed the findings back into the plan. Even a slight improvement could make all the difference.

Test the Plan Again

Did I mention testing? Even if you have a real-life crisis, use the learnings and feedback to improve the plan again. Every opportunity to stress the crisis plan, people and procedures must happen.

Test it Again

It must be tested, whatever happens, at least once a year, and reviewed yearly. You will be surprised at how much your business changes over a year; a process may be updated, people and roles change, and telephone numbers and email addresses frequently updated. If your plan doesn’t reflect even these simple changes, it is more likely to fail.

The Holy Trinity Mantra

Finally, if in doubt, remember these three elements of your plan. I like to ensure they are seen through in this order, but you may feel differently according to your business and how it operates. (If people don’t list as number one on your list, take a long, hard look at yourself.) Nonetheless, The Trinity remains the same.

Focus on People – without your people, you have no business to speak of, recovered or otherwise.
Focus on Facilities – even with just a pen, paper, telephone, and somewhere to work, your people can work miracles in keeping the business afloat. Keep them safe, secure and happy.
Focus on Technology – get the systems running to take the strain off the people. This may have taken days or weeks, depending on the incident. Ensure your critical systems are running first, and that includes payroll. Paid people pull together in a crisis. Unpaid people don’t.

Hopefully, you will never have to use the plan, but if you do, feeling prepared for anything is a powerful way to ensure your best work on everything else on your list. Knowing that you have it ready to go is like remembering to take your umbrella with you when you leave the house. Because you have it, it isn’t going to rain; mildly annoying but so much better than getting caught in a monsoon in your best work attire.

*Also known as the Crisis Management Plan, Business Continuity Plan, When It Hits The Fan Plan, or any other variable that works for you, your company, and your business culture.

Links to other interesting stuff on the web (affiliate links)

How to Upskill Your Cybersecurity Team

The AWS Security Cheat Sheet

Think Before You Share The Link

CISO Basics, Part 2

Leave a comment April 5, 2023 Thom Langford

In the last post, I looked at some of the less apparent activities upon becoming a new CISO, namely:

Stop thinking that infosec is your business.
Stop making technology purchases.
Ask your vendors to explain what you have in your services inventory.

In this post, we will take this a step further and closer to actual business as usual and maintaining your security team as a functional part of the organisation.

Don’t say “NO!” to everything.

This is an obvious thing to do, but it is much harder to do in practice. The reality is that this requires a complete change in mindset from the traditional view of the everyday CISO. As a species, the CISO is a defensive creature who is often required to back up every decision and be the scapegoat of every mistake (see One CISO, Three Envelopes https://thomlangford.com/2014/12/01/three-envelopes-one-ciso/) and generally rubber-stamp choices that are out of their bailiwick and control.

The mindset shift requires a leap of faith wholly because of this perceived threat of blame and accountability when, in fact, it does just the reverse.

It starts naturally enough with the language that is used by the CISO and the team, for instance, changing the Change Approval meeting to the Risk Review meeting and not communicating a yes/no or go/no-go response to changes but rather a level of risk associated with the request and alternative approaches as appropriate. There is a need to communicate this shift in the culture, of course, but people will see that they are accountable for decisions that affect the business, not the security team. Shifting the mindset away from being a gatekeeper to a security team that provides sensible and straightforward advice based upon clearly understood risk criteria is a fundamental step towards avoiding being known as the Business Prevention Unit. Politely correct other’s language when they mention an action that requires sign-off or approval from “Security” and help them understand their role in the business decision.

This approach does not require a snap of the fingers for 50% of the problems to go away. Still, carefully planning and educating your stakeholders alters the impact you can have on the business dramatically for the better. It also allows you to more easily draw a line between the activities of the security team and the company’s performance, all for the price of merely no longer saying “no”.

Stop Testing Your Perimeter

What? Are you serious?!

Absolutely.

As you enter a new environment, you will be taking many critical pieces of information on trust and from people with vested interests in their careers, livelihoods and reputations. Your arrival upsets the status quo and has the potential to disrupt the equilibrium; all reasons to not always be forthcoming with every piece of information you request. It isn’t about people being dishonest or deliberately misleading you, but merely being complex, multi-faceted human beings with multiple drivers and influences.

Your perimeter is one of the fundamental pieces of your information security puzzle. Despite cries of “the perimeter is dead”, it remains a prominent place for attacks to happen and where you should feel fully confident that you know every node in that environment to the best of your ability.

Whatever your testing cycle is, suspend it for some time and conduct as complete an investigation as possible into precisely what your perimeter comprises. It can be done automatically with discovery tools, manually through interviews with those responsible, visually in data centres (where you have old school “tin” still being used, and any combination of the above. You will likely find devices that you, and probably existing team members, weren’t aware of, especially with the proliferation of the Internet of Things devices being used throughout the enterprise now. Did facilities install a new access control system or room booking system? Did they consult IT, or more to the point, you?

It sounds like the stuff of legend or the script to the Ocean’s 11 movies, but do you remember when a Las Vegas casino was broken into… through their fish tank? Knowing what devices are where on your network and perimeter is vital and must be considered table stakes in any decent security programme. An alternative is simply a form of security theatre that gives the impression of security and does nothing but create a false sense of security. A cycle of no testing is worth discovering what you don’t know because you can do something about it.

Building your plan

Now you have a grip on your environment in a relatively straightforward, simple, effective and quick way. Through this process, you will ascertain your stakeholders, advocates and even a few potential adversaries. Then, armed with this information, you can provide an accurate picture of the business to the business in a way that makes sense and displays a grasp of the fundamentals.

Building your plan will always start with your initial assessment and what needs to be done to become operational or steady-state. The trick, however, is to ensure that this baseline achievement is perceived as the end state of security but rather merely the first stepping stone to ever more impressive services, capabilities and ultimately, profit and growth for the company.

The plan itself, however? That is yours and yours alone. Although other posts in this Blog will help as you plot your course into the future, nothing will replace your understanding of the local culture, organisation and, ultimately, what you need to achieve to meet the expectations of the business leadership. Know what the rules of your organisation are, when to adhere to them, when to bend them, and most importantly, when to break them (but only when experience tells you it is the right thing to do):