If you will permit me to zoom out, the overall trend you have identified
is that security has moved up the stack to higher and higher layers of
abstraction. Since it is impossible to know all the systems, security
has specialized. And since security issues lurk at greater quantities
at higher layers of abstraction, it makes sense for someone in a CISO
role to focus on higher layers of abstraction (as opposed to, say,
focusing on reverse engineering a small cross-section of binaries
of interest.)
it used to be knowing systems meant learning to look inside obscure
binaries and figuring out how to turn them to your ends like an
anthropologist decoding ancient tablets (breaking into systems by hand),
and doing this so well that you could defend against others doing it
effectively. basically, nobody else had any idea how anything worked, it
seemed they were all living in fantasy worlds based on marketing
materials.
it’s been a decade or two now for me, and i don’t know how it is in the
present day. since the era of the dedicated hacker there are public tools
maybe starting with metasploit that magnify power immensely. various
actors
have stimulated serious reduction in the quality of new code while other
groups have secured some systems very strongly, such as blockchains.
phones and routers still languish without updates while vulnerabilities
sit
in public databases to be used. things like this likely shift the power
away from the researcher.
i took one brief intro in cybersecurity and it was all AI, training
models
to detect and respond to anomalies.
and those same powerful entities put backdoors straight in the hardware,
contributing to frustration of complete review.
my personal experiences lend me to think that AI has been used on the
offensive for quite some time now. it seems things may have also shifted
a
ton toward social influence, which may even simply be more familiar to
most
people.
On Mon, Mar 4, 2024 at 06:24 Cyber Cyber Cyber Cyber <
cybercybercybercyber@substack.com> wrote:
eye of newt and toe of frog
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͏
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Recipe for a CISO
<
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eye
of newt and toe of frog
J.M. Porup
<
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Mar 4
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<
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<
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<
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READ IN APP
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this
won’t hurt at all, promise
What exactly is a CISO, anyway?
I see CISO job ads asking for people’s GitHub handles, but you’re not
hiring a developer, and you're not hiring an engineering manager,
you're
hiring a CISO.
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Pledge your support
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Security engineering is not about writing code, so even if you were
an Security Engineering Manager you still wouldn’t want to be measuring
candidates based on the code they write.
So if a CISO isn’t just a weird form of security engineering manager,
what exactly do we do all day long, anyway?
What’s the recipe for a CISO?
One bushel of technical systems knowledge
How do things work? You can’t secure a system if you don’t understand
system at least as well as attackers. From my point of view, that
means a
good CISO is much more likely to come out of traditional IT or even a
DevSecOps role than from a developer role. Developers are generally
laser-focused on a specific tech stack—deep and narrow—but a CISO
needs to
spread themselves thin across everyone and everything in their
org—shallow
but broad.
a demijohn of people, people, people
Not just technology, but also process and people. Because the human
systems you are defending are not technical. CISOs are focused on risk
management, and the way you manage risk—since risk mitigation is almost
always part of risk management—is to change things. To change the way
people do things. In other words, change management. But people hate
change! Oh my lord do people hate change. So exercising diplomacy and
influence across an org is key to securing an org. That’s not a 133t
supercoder job.
a peck of security mindset
No one can be successful in any security role without the security
mindset. This is the adversarial thinking that distinguishes a builder
from
a breaker, and it’s the raw material I look for when interviewing
candidates. You can teach technical skills, but you can’t teach
adversarial
thinking to someone who lacks the knack. It’s a raw talent that I’ve
discovered in people both technical and non-technical. A CISO unable to
think creatively about adversaries—whether the North Korean military, a
ransomware gang, or the Irish Data Protection Authority—is not going
to be
effective in their role.
two liters of leadership ability
A one-man CISO is just a phony title. Ultimately a company of any size
that needs a CISO is going to need a security team for the CISO to
lead.
But that means the CISO needs to be an effective team leader who knows
how
to delegate, to motivate, to discipline—to get the most out of their
team
for the benefit of their employer. This includes leading on both
security
engineering (managing real securiy risk) as well as security compliance
(working with Legal to meet regulatory risk appetite, acquiring
security
certifications like ISO 27001 to enable the business to close deals,
etc).
a barrel of business mindset
It is a tempting but fatal rookie error in security to be an absolutist
about security. This is unhelpful and makes you a bad CISO. A CISO is
not
just a technical engineering manager—a CISO is a business executive
whose
job is to working closely with the CEO and Board of Directors to
balance
risk and opportunity to meet business goals. A CISO is not a high
hiring
then
the
priest of
security trying to achieve perfection or a Cassandra warning of doom.
Risk
is part of doing business, and security risk is part of doing business.
Making sure the business understand that risk, and helping the
business to
choose between accepting risk or spending money to mitigate that risk,
is
the fundamental service the CISO provides.
a heaping tablespoonful of lawyer
I am not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV. But I need a solid grasp
of
the law in order to do my job. As I explained to a disbelieving
colleague—a
> > software engineering manager—security straddles the fence between
> > Engineering and Legal. Legal and regulatory risk are a major part of
my job
> > as a CISO. When my adversaries aren’t just criminal hackers but
government
> > regulators, I better understand the regulations that we aim to either
> > comply with (or, as an executive decision involving the General
Counsel, to
> > not comply with because the risk of a regulatory fine is so low).
> > a pinch of accountant
> >
> > You can either accept risk or spend money to mitigate risk. That means
you
> > need a solid beancounter mentality to be effective as a CISO. How much
> > money should we spend? What's the cost/benefit analysis of that spend?
> > (What's your Security ROI?) Are you spending money wisely, and being a
good
> > steward of company funds?
> > a megaphone of hostage negotiator
> >
> > Negotiating contracts with security vendors sometimes feels like a
hostage
> > negotiation. "Pay us this crazy money for a substandard product, or the
> > hostage gets it." In this case my employer is the hostage. It’s not
> > racketeering but it sometimes feels like it! Being able to go to the
mat
> > with vendors and tear into their offering to get a better price is a
> > crucial skill for a CISO. It’s not enough to just mitigate security
risk,
> > you should be optimizing for cost as well.
> > Recipe
> >
> > Throw all the ingredients into a blender. Puree on low for twenty
years or
> > so. Pour into a suit hoodie (half suit, half hoodie) and serve with a
> > heaping side order of ambiguity.
> >
> > Thanks for reading Cyber Cyber Cyber Cyber! Subscribe for free to
receive
> > new posts and support my work.
> >
> > Pledge your support
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> >
> >
> > © 2024 J.M. Porup
> > 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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>
> >
> > [image: Get the app]
> > <
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>[image:
> > Start writing]
> > <
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>
> >
Karl Semich