Attitude, Knowledge, Opinion and Expertise; an information security career map?

3 Comments October 20, 2014 Thom Langford

I was talking to one of my colleagues a few days ago who joined our team a little under a year ago. Althea (I promised her a name check here) actually joined the security team from the small group of personal assistants in the company. While this is perhaps not the most obvious place to recruit into a technically savvy environment from, Althea has very quickly become an excellent member of the team.

I often hear in conferences and panels about the security skills shortage we are currently suffering, and I regularly quote the story of Althea joining us as an example of how we are very often simply looking in the wrong places and should be looking to promote from within more. Althea has been with the company for six years (a long time these days) and was working for and supporting some of the most senior people in our company. She had to be organised, forthright, able to communicate succinctly and above all remain calm under pressure (you know how senior executives can be sometimes).

For me, her attitude is far more important than her technical ability. Technology and hard skills are things that can be taught in relatively short periods of time; attitude is something that takes a lot longer to learn, decades even. Althea is already well on her way to getting the requisite technical skills required of her role, but her organisational skills, contacts within the organisation, and ability to communicate to people throughout the organisation whatever their seniority is second to none.

I was talking to her about this and related the competence framework I use to try and understand both mine and others maturity in their role. When first moving into a new role you move through each of one of these phases of competence:

Unconsciously Incompetent
Consciously Incompetent
Consciously competent
Unconsciously competent

(you might want to reread those a few times, I know I did when I first came across them)

So, if you start with the right attitude, you are going to minimise the amount of time you spend being unconsciously incompetent, as the next logical step is to acquire knowledge. This allows your to bring the right skills to bear onto your role, and bring you quickly into being consciously incompetent and possibly beyond. Minimising the time you spend in the first two phases is of course very important to your career.

But knowledge really isn’t everything. Those with just the knowledge can’t see beyond their day to day tasks and roles; they are unable to see the “big picture” as everything is focussed around technical solutions and black and white answers to business problems. (Just listen to some of the “questions” asked at every security conference you go to; they are not really questions but affirmation that their knowledge is greater than the speaker. They wholly miss the point that knowledge is actually all they have.) I would suggest that forming your own opinions on subjects is a logical and vital step in anyone’s career path. Business problems are not black and white, there are a variety of approaches, solutions, outcomes and inputs that those with a purely knowledge/technical viewpoint simply won’t appreciate. Forming and gathering these opinions takes place through reading, observing, listening, writing and finally testing your opinions in the community. These experiences are not just the gathering of specific knowledge, but the nuances of what can be right in one circumstance, wrong in another and even every possibility in between.

For instance, shipping a single, failed drive that was part of a RAID 5 cluster back to the manufacturer may be the right thing to do for some organizations. From a security knowledge perspective this is anathema unless the drive has been degaussed or even fully destroyed; it completely depends on the business, circumstance and many other factors. Encrypting backup tapes? Obviously this should be done, except of course when it shouldn’t, for the same reasons as before. Security is only one opinion in a sea of opinions that matter.

Having opinions in this industry is vital to stimulate conversation and evolve our understanding and viewpoints in our own workplaces. Once this opinion is applied in a considered and effective manner, only then could one possibly consider themselves having “expertise”, and I wouldn’t label yourself that before someone else does first.

In order to allow your team to grow in this manner it is vital to encourage them to engage with both the internal company community as well as information security community as a whole. Encourage them to take part in any related event, internal and external, or even organise one. What about volunteering to help at a conference, or ultimately even apply to speak? By giving your team members the opportunity to research, write, precis, deliver, defend and receive feedback on a topic of their choice they have the best opportunity to take their knowledge beyond the day to day and into the more opinion based level of the strategic, and become better decision makers in the process.

A Christmas Public Service Announcement

1 Comment December 6, 2013 Thom Langford

I have known the good folks of Twist and Shout for a few years now and think their approach to information security awareness and education is spot on. Using good production values, great scripting and where appropriate some humour they have made some great short films. I have been fortunate enough to use some in my own presentations as well.

I am thrilled to be playing a part in their latest Christmas viral in collaboration with another project I am involved in, Host Unknown. I hope you enjoy it.

(It also explains why I have been sporting a beard for the last few weeks.)

Why I am an Analogies Project contributor

1 Comment July 24, 2013 Thom Langford

That devilishly handsome bloke you see to the right is Bruce Hallas. I used to go to school with him nearly 25 years ago, and then last summer, at the first old boys school reunion that our year organised since leaving I met him again, and it turns out we are in the same infosec business. I spoke to him about all of the good work I am doing, the company I work for, the many countries I visited and generally tried to make myself feel more important than the skinny eighteen year old I was when I last saw him. He told me that he runs his own infosec consultancy, his own blog, works with the UK government, and was in the process of setting up “a project” as a freely available, self funding, resource of analogies/stories to help people better understand information security. (Bruce immediately won the “my life is awesome since leaving school” competition of course.)

Since that time, The Analogies Project has grown from one man, an idea and a website to something producing real, quality content, and with a very promising and bright future.

In the words of the Project itself;

The Analogies Project has a clear mission. To tackle the unintelligibility of information security head on and secure the engagement of a much broader audience. Its aim is to bridge the chasm between the users, stakeholders and beneficiaries of information security and those responsible for delivering it.

Through a series of innovative initiatives the Analogies Project will enable information security professionals to effectively communicate with their chosen audiences. The content will be delivered through a variety of alternative communication techniques, media and partners.

The part of this project that I like the most is that it is essentially a community project. Bruce isn’t charging money for membership to the analogies as they are written (and they are coming thick and fast now!), and none of the contributors are charging for their work either. There are not only the web contributions in the form of a library, but a book planned, a conference, and even an opera! With the momentum that is currently behind the project at the moment there is every reason to believe in its future success.

So why am I contributing? Honestly, I have selfish and philanthropic reasons to do so. Obviously it gets my name out there, allows me to practise my writing, test some ideas and also say “I was there from the start”. All that aside though, I have frequently struggled in my day job to get infosec concepts across to people, either directly, in meetings or even in awareness training. To have had a resource like this available to me five years ago would have made my life so much easier, allowed me to advance the infosec “cause” more effectively and given me a set of tools I knew were consistant with the prevailing thoughts of industry commentators. Having a centralised, peer validated, toolkit available is fundamental to us as professionals when it comes to the messaging we give to our users, clients, bosses, teams and even the infosec community as a whole.

It’s still early days, but I have submitted my first contribution just last week (soon to be published I hope) and I am already inspired enough to be working on my second and third. There are a number of analogies already in place, and I would urge you to read them and consider them in the context of your current communications to your audiences, whomever they may be. The book will be another important milestone and one I hope to play a part in; indeed I hope to be able to play a part in the the project for the forseeable future, and why I am happy and proud to display my “contributor” badge up on the top right of this site.

If you feel you have something to contribute, then head over to The Analogies Project and let Bruce and the organisers know. If you don’t feel ready to, then certainly check it out anyway. You won’t regret it.

And they say security awareness training is working?

3 Comments June 20, 2013 Thom Langford

Having been involved in the security awareness debate quite a lot recently I have no desire to bang this drum even further, especially as on the whole I support the concept of security awareness training. However I am constantly having my faith in the training rocked just from observing people’s day to day activities.

I found myself in one of the lounges in Delhi airport at around midnight last night. in a period of less than thirty minutes I found two laptops and an iPad logged in and unattended in plain view. Now, I really do understand that people may consider these kind of environments as ‘safe’ and will therefore let their guard down. What I fear however is that they have blatantly disregarded their security awareness training and policies that will no doubt explicitly state that it is unacceptable to leave mobile devices unattended and unsecured in any environment, possibly including the workplace. Without wishing to become an amateur sociologist I would imagine these are educated, intelligent people because

They are able to afford expensive looking laptops or have been issued an expensive looking laptop
Are flying business class (or similar) and are therefore likely to be working for a company that can afford to pay for this level of comfort (a decreasing number on my experience)

If they are so intelligent and educated, why are they ignoring their training? Why are they putting their company and client data at risk in such a blatant way? It is my belief that the training provided has not effectively put across the reasons and incentives for securing mobile devices in the outside world.

Now you see it…

Can you see it?

The third offending item was another laptop, but as I was furtively aligning myself to take a picture the owner returned from the toilet It was left in very similar circumstances in a high traffic area.

Given the number of laptops I have seen left in Starbucks and other cafes (and indeed have blogged about elsewhere here) I am seriously considering starting a gallery to showcase these examples and perhaps start using them as a litmus test of the effectiveness of any company’s security awareness programme. Until these cases become exceedingly rare, to my mind the existing programmes are simply not working as they were intended, and until they do, behaviour such as this which smacks of convenience and possibly a little laziness will continue to put data at risk.

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.