Leadership
“You will respect my authority” … is a sure fast way to be ignored in the business world!
Much like gatekeeping, excessive focus on policies, lack of engagement with the audience and generally mandating security policies and procedures that are not practical will likely not end with a robust, resilient security posture. Read more “Cyber Security in a business environment”
Leadership
Wow a big question, right? I can’t answer this for you, obviously I’d recommend that you consider cyber insurance, however I’d also recommend that you:
I’m not going to write lots this evening on the subject, but I was reviewing a report and thought in line with some research that I started recently (but was side-tracked) and then have seen the report so purchased that instead! (Sometimes it’s easier to not do everything yourself right!)
Read more “Cyber Insurance: How would I decide to buy it or not?”
Leadership
Have you ever thought about what kind of data/intelligence you may need with regards to vulnerability management? It tends to vary at levels of abstraction based on the audiance, but don’t think the person doing the patching may not be considernig upwards or that someone in a C level position won’t care about the zeros and ones (life doesn’t work that way!)
Anyway I was talking to a friend and came up with these so thought I’d share them with the world. Have I done a decent job? can you think of others? How do you measure and report? What are your concerns?
Let’s take a look at what I came up with (this wasn’t a very long time in the making 
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Leadership
Ok so you might be sitting here going… but Dan you send pews and do “techy” stuff… do you not lead? Well, I mean I do all kinds of things, I write business cases, I play with spreadsheets (fun right!), I integrate systems and look at data and sometimes write really bad code! (hey, the pews aren’t going to send themselves!) but… I want to talk about some realities here.
Read more “Cyber Leadership”
Leadership
I thought it would be fun to explore what people do with regards to Cyber Securityleadeship, budgets, contraints and realities of business change. So here’s a blog post to supliment my thread on twitter:
please note: the list below is based on experiance, it’s also a list I made whilst drinking about half a cup of tea so it’s not complete or “the answer” it’s just some observations about an approach I advocate.
Read more “Tabletop: “you have 400 servers; 800 users and your cyber security budget is 100K…. what do you do?””
Leadership
I’ve been travelling to different organisations and visiting different networks for a while and whilst each organisation is unique (they really are) their operating models, technology challenges and weak security postures generally aren’t as unique as the organisational itself.
One thing that does spring to mind however is that there is a massively common pattern we find with organisations.
One thing that is common though, is that all of this tends to link to financial investments, so executives and boards usually have some idea if they are spending or not in this space, what they commonly don’t have a good view on is they getting what they “thought they were buying”. Sadly, too often what they assumed was “in the box” with the “IT provision” with regards to quality and cyber security just simply isn’t the case. Everything is fine, until you look… then it’s less than fine! So, what can we do about it?
Read more “Why do “we” suck so badly at digital security ?”
Defense
That is quite the catchy title don’t you agree? Ok so that needs some work and when we think about cloud security, we need to realise that Computing as a Service isn’t a silver bullet.
Ok so the cloud was promised as the saviour of IT and Cyber security but the promise vs the reality. Well, let’s be frank, they don’t really match up. But have no fear – secure cloud design is here (omg cringe)! Ok now we have that out of my system let’s look at some basic cloud security considerations to make when thinking about cloud services.
Ok so the world doesn’t work with a checklist however, if you are like me you will want to use lists and aides to jog the little grey cells into action. Let’s think about cloud services and security: Read more “Cloud Security – 26 Foundational Security Practises and Capabilities Checklist”
Defense
Protecting admin interfaces is a really good idea, network segmentation however is one thing that many organisations struggle with. Most networks are what we call flat. They may be carved up into VLANs but generally speaking, in a lot of networks if you are “inside” then you have full access across the TCP/IP space.
Now here we are talking about the internal attack surface, so a threat actor would need network routable access which should not be the case for things like vcenter interfaces from the internet, however it appears that’s not really exactly how the world works.
Let’s look in Shodan! Read more “CVE-2021-22005 – vCenter RCE”
Defense
I’m sure you will have had a marketing firm or some random sales person on Linkedin tell you that security should be simple and that their product will save you from all the ATPs and nation state hax0rs under the sun. However let’s get real, thats almost certainly not true and also security isnt simple or we’d all be out of jobs and everyon woulndn’t be getting owned all the time.
Defense
It is a blur so far, I figured after the last place the grass would be greener, surely no one else has that many security challenges. I did some due diligence during the interview process, they seemed very confident about having certifications and that they took security seriously. hell, that should have set some red flags off but even the cynical sometimes hope that it is as someone says.
I have started to work myself around the board and I am making friends with people, my diary is filled with zoom calls and my notebook is already many pages deep.
You cannot make this stuff up though, day two and I’ve dealing with a business email compromise incident, the phishing page was not even in good English but then it only takes a second or so whilst in a meeting to not quite realise your running on autopilot so you cannot blame people. Hell, the branding was copied so we know it was a targeted phish. It would have been nice to at least had centralised logs for the team to analyse though. Read more “The grass is always greener, until it is not”