Articles tagged with "Security Teams"
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Part 1 - My First 100 Days in ProdSec at a Series E Startup
After working in the application security consulting industry for nearly two decades and helping to solve my clients’ most difficult challenges, it was time to put what I used to tell others into practice. These are my lessons from the first 100 days. I’ve created security teams, bug bounty programs, set up tooling strategies, hiring plans, and more. I thought I’d hit the ground running and start making an impact on day 1, or at least day 99, while I made some impact early I had a lot to learn.
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Credit: Joe Basirico
Phase One of Appsec Engineering: Awareness
This is part of a series Introduction Awareness (you are here) Enablement (coming soon) Enforcement (coming soon) Last week I published a post introducing three important phases of AppSec Engineering: Awareness, Enablement, and Enforcement. Over the next three posts I will dive into each of these topics to share best practices and guidelines you can roll out to optimize your security engineering practice.
In my experience, the best AppSec programs start with AppSec awareness training.
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Credit: Joe Basirico
The Three Phases of Appsec Engineering
This is part of a series Introduction (you are here) Awareness Enablement (coming soon) Enforcement (coming soon) In order for an AppSec team to collaborate effectively with development teams they should think in three phases: Awareness, Enablement, and Enforcement. This month I’ll be dedicating an article to each. The focus of these articles will be on the critically important area of application security, focused on the roles involved in building software: developers (DevOps), testers, and architects.
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Mini-Post: Stop Acting Like Phishers
There are two sides to preventing a successful phishing attack. The first side is focusing on the user; trying to train users to identify phishing attacks and to protect themselves from these types of attacks. Training is important, but there’s a responsibility on the company to act in a way that does not emulate common phishing techniques and set your users up for failure.
The second side of the successful phishing attack is the software and technology side.
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Credit: Joe Basirico
Mini-Post: Reducing Vulnerability Classes to Near Zero Through Secure Defaults and Good Choices
“If you could wave a magic wand and do anything to reduce vulnerabilities, what would you do?”
Some common answers are things like training and education, forcing penetration testing, better tools, and smarter users, but none of these things really strike at the core of the issue. Where is the vulnerability garden? Where are those vulnerabilities planted? Can we make that soil hostile to vulnerabilities and rich for good coding practices?
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Credit: Joe Basirico & Rob Curran
Building a Security Team of 500
I recently talked with a CISO friend of mine who was struggling to scale his security team. He has fewer than 10 security people on his team to support an organization with over 500 developers and 2000 employees. Responding to all of the requests which include: development best practices, legal and compliance, security awareness, IT security, trying to organize his team to perform the scanning, testing, reviews and more left him under water and stressed out!
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How to Scale an Application Security Program - Part Two
In my last blog post, I wrote about what an application security program is and why it matters. In this post, I’ll cover what it takes to build and scale an effective application security program. I’ve seen many different ways that a well-intentioned program can fail to meet its objectives. While there may be many ways to fail, there are just a few key characteristics that lead to success.
The program must be:
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How to Scale an Application Security Program - Part One
In the late 1990s I worked on the security team for Internet Explorer. In fact, I was the first hire that Microsoft made in response to an influx of browser-based security vulnerabilities. I got to see what it looks like when a development team is bombarded by security problems that are serious enough to require a response and yet there’s no process to handle it. In the early days we would get at least one new vulnerability each week.
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It's Always About People
It seems like everyone is struggling to build a scalable application security program these days. Budgets are small, internal politics and bureaucratic inertia are a real problem, and in the meantime the threat landscape isn’t waiting while your business figures things out.
I would love it if my conversations with customers could be focused on a holistic, risk-centered approache that combines improvements to people, process, and tools in order to reduce risk to manageable levels.
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It Will Go Wrong. What Will You Do When It Does?
A friend of mine just left the world of consulting. I asked him for the biggest change in his thinking, he said:
Something is going to go wrong. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when. When that bad thing goes wrong everything hinges on how you detect and respond to it.
As consultants so much of our job is focused on reducing risk for our clients, but that’s all we can do.
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You Are Spending Too Much on Security
… or not enough, but you certainly don’t have it right.
Security takes commitment, but it’s not as simple as all or nothing. Knowing how much to commit for your level of risk tolerance is critical. The first thing you need to do when improving your security program is set honest goals about what you want to achieve.
Ideal security investment means, do what is necessary and nothing more. Every dollar you spend to secure something that isn’t going to be attacked is a dollar that isn’t used to lead the market, build new features, or sell and market your solutions.
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Security Takes Commitment
In my last post , I talked about the fact that none of us knows how to solve the problem of cybersecurity. It’s a tautology, so it shouldn’t be surprising. If we knew how to solve the problem, the problem would be solved. Therefore we don’t know how to solve the problem. But it is surprising, and so it feels like a ‘hard truth’ rather than ‘the truth’.
When confronted with a long-standing problem (like cybersecurity), it is typical to assume that if we had more will, more resources, more intelligence, or perhaps more of all of the above, we could solve the problem.
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None of Us Knows What We Are Doing
I want to let you in on a little secret. Nobody in the security profession, especially those of us in the software security profession, truly knows what we are doing. You’d never know it talking to security vendors. If you attend a security conference you can walk the booths and talk to hundreds of security professionals selling solutions that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, each promising that they will solve your security problems with their technology platform, their professional services, and most importantly with their new deep learning, AI algorithms.
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Anonymous Is Better at SysAdmin Than You
Earlier this year I listened to Sabu talk. Sabu the hacker. The same guy who was the brains behind Anonymous, who knocked down email servers in Iran, who attacked DNS servers in China, who participated in the cyber fight during the Arab Spring. The same Sabu who turned on his fellow hackers, putting them behind bars in order to reduce his own prison sentence.
This is a guy who has been on the dark side and come out to tell us about it.
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Inspiring Your Teams in Security
Security enforcement is the traditional way of thinking about security, in which security teams are set as a gate to pass before software is allowed to be released. Because of this, development teams see security requirements as hurdles to pass instead of valuable insights. This isn’t unreasonable, most security teams have set themselves up this way, standing as the last bastion of security. I’ve heard security colleagues even say things like “every vulnerability must be fixed before ship!
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