Make Cybersecurity Great Again, Again.

Another ‘we can fix infosec‘ is out there.

“OK I admit we can’t make cybersecurity great again, because it never was great in the first place”.

It was certainly better than it is now. At one point in time, we had the technical folk, but not the managers. Now we have neither. There was a brain drain from security around the early 2000s whereby tech folk left in droves, either voluntarily or ‘as a business need’. They were seen as aesthetically unpleasing at a time where the perception was that a threat did not exist! In the proceeding years risks increased on the top of the aforementioned shedding of intellectual capital from organisations. Then around 2010 things reached boiling point when security incidents found their way back on the front pages of the Financial Times.

So around 2010 some organisations wanted to get ‘tech’ again but since all the skills were lost 10 years ago, who knows what good looks like? The same folk who inherited the kingdom of security with their fine aesthetics were now charged with finding the skills, while not knowing what the skills look like.

“President Trump recently appointed Rudy Giuliani as cybersecurity adviser. Some reacted to this as a joke”. I would agree that this reaction is short sighted.

“Well me and my colleagues are in industry and we see the issues every day, we are the consultants, the IT auditors, systems administrators, security managers and network engineers. No we are not CEOs or business owners but it’s our job to educate and inform these business leaders of the risk of doing business on the internet. Sometimes they listen and too often they don’t seem to hear us”. All you can do is confidently state your case and get it in writing somewhere. But be aware that confidence should never be faked. Either learn the skills necessary FAST, or find another vocation. C-levels can detect BS ladies and gentlemen and the more of you that try to BS a C-level, the harder you’re making it for the rest of us. Ask yourselves why it is that security was once a board level thing and now most security chiefs reports to a CIO or COO.

“I see this every day as I travel across Florida doing IT audits and assessments. The organizations with a security role funded do 90 percent better than those with no such funded position.” Audits are a poor way of assessing the performance of security. Really poor in fact. Although it can be said that if an audit is failed – that’s uber bad, but if an audit is passed it does not mean all is good.

“One of the problems of the Internet is that we didn’t install what I like to call strong user authentication or strong file authentication.” Yes, we did. Its called an Operating System. For the most part the security sector has shied away from the OS because its hard for folk who don’t have an IT background to understand. Infosec would like to convince decision makers that it doesn’t exist, because if it does exist, then vendors can’t sell many of the snake oil offerings, and non-tech infosec folk are in a vulnerable position.

Operating Systems come with a slew of controls that can be used to thwart and/or detect attacks – perhaps it would be good if we started using them and reporting on how effectively the organisation uses each control? Why spend extra on snake oil products? For example, why spend gazillions on identity management in cloud deployments when we already have it?

“All too often we see organizations relegating cyber security to the IT department. I have said this a hundred times, cybersecurity is a business problem not an IT issue”. This statement suits a certain agenda that plays to the non-tech/GRC oriented folk. Security is a business problem AND an IT problem, but in terms of the intellectual capital required, its 10% a business problem, and 90% an IT problem.

“All users need awareness training” – yes, i think we are now at the stage where security has to be something that is everyone’s responsibility in the same way as checking for cars before crossing the road is everyone’s responsibility.

Infosec is in dire straits because of the loss of critical skills from the sector, and now we have a situation where people with the wrong skills are reporting to the likes of Rudy Giuliani with a lack of confidence and a myriad of confused messages, mostly built around self-serving interests at the expense of the whole. Its likely the former mayor of NY won’t be any wiser as to the scale of the problem, and therefore how to solve it.

Security professionals with no IT background are like animals handlers who are afraid of animals, and its these folk who are representing the sector.

The message that will be delivered to Giuliani will include the part that the sector needs more money. You know it really doesn’t – it needs less. Stop spending money on “next gen” products where “old gen” gets it done. “Legacy” stuff isn’t legacy unless you allow yourself to be duped by vendors into believing that its legacy. Really firewalls and OS offer most of what’s needed.

The same goes for people. We have too many people. Don’t create jobs around products – this is creating micro-specialisations that you are then calling ‘skills’, and hiring dedicated staff who won’t be very busy and won’t be very enthused or ‘synergistic’. This is what you’re looking for...http://www.seven-stones.biz/blog/addressing-the-information-security-skills-gap/

As Upton Sinclair said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This quote lends itself to the problems in information security more than any other sector. Moreover it has defined information security as a broken entity since it was first adopted seriously by banks and then others.