Friday Summary: Halloween 2013 Edition
While you’re thinking about little kids in scary costumes, I’m here thinking about adults who write scary code. As I go through the results of a couple different companies’ code scans I am trying to contrast good vs. bad secure development programs. But I figure I should ask the community at large: What facet of your secure software development program has been most effective? Can you pinpoint one? For many years I felt placing requirements within the development lifecycle (i.e.: process modifications) yielded the greatest returns. I have spoken with many development teams over the past year who said that security awareness training was the biggest benefit, while others most appreciated threat modeling. Still others claimed that external penetration testing or code scans motivated their teams to do better, learn more about software defects, and improve internally. The funny bit is that every team states one of these events was the root cause which raised awareness and motivated changes. Multiple different causes for the same basic effect. I have been privy to the results from a few different code scans at different companies this summer; some with horrific results, and one far better than I could have ever expected, given the age and size of the code base. And it seems the better the results, the harder the development team takes external discoveries of security defects. Developers are proud, and if security is something they pride themselves on, defect reports are akin to calling their children ugly. I am typically less interested in defect reports than in understanding the security program in general. Part of my interest in going through each firm’s secure development program is seeing what changes were made, and which the team found most beneficial. Once again, the key overall benefit reported by each team varies between organizations. Many say security training, but training does not equal development success. Others say “It’s part of our culture”, which is a rather meaningless response, but those organizations do a bit of everything, and they scored considerably better on security tests. It is now clear to me, despite my biases for threat modeling and process changes, that for organizations that have been doing this a while no single element or program that makes the difference. It is the cumulative effect of consistently making security part of code development. Some event started the journey, and – as with any skill – time and effort produced improvement. But overall, improvement in secure code development looks glacial. It is a bit like compound interest: what appears minuscule in the beginning becomes huge after a few years. When you meet up with organizations that have been at it for a long time, it is startling see just how well the basic changes work. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Dave Lewis’s CSO post: “LinkedIn intro: Data, meet security issues”. Juniper blog quotes Adrian on DB-DoS. Adrian’s DR post: Simple is better. Gunner on The Internet-of-Things. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: Don’t Mess with Pen Test(ers). Adrian Lane: Thinking Small and Not Leading. It is unfortunately common to discover that a job is quite different than you thought. And how best to accomplish your goals often involves several rounds of trial and error. Mike Rothman: The Pragmatic Guide to Network Security Management: The Process. Rich had me at Pragmatic… Other Securosis Posts The Pragmatic Guide to Network Security Management: SecOps. Incite 10/30/2013: Managing the Details. New Series: The Executive Guide to Pragmatic Network Security Management. Summary: Planned Coincidence. Favorite Outside Posts Dave Lewis: Buffer Hacked. David Mortman: Adventures in Dockerland. Not a security article but something for security to keep in mind. Docker is making big inroads in the cloud, especially PaaS, so you need to understand it. Adrian Lane: Big Data Analytics: Starting Small. A short post with pragmatic advice. Mike Rothman: Time doesn’t exist until we invent it. As always, interesting perspective from Seth Godin about time… “Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day…” Gal: Fake social media ID duped security-aware IT guys. Research Reports and Presentations Firewall Management Essentials. A Practical Example of Software Defined Security. Continuous Security Monitoring. API Gateways: Where Security Enables Innovation. Identity and Access Management for Cloud Services. Dealing with Database Denial of Service. The 2014 Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide. The CISO’s Guide to Advanced Attackers. Defending Cloud Data with Infrastructure Encryption. Network-based Malware Detection 2.0: Assessing Scale, Accuracy and Deployment. Top News and Posts Kristin Calhoun Keynote at API Strategy and Practice WhiteHat has a new secure browser; what does the Firefox say? via Wendy Nather. A More Agile Healthcare.gov NSA Chief: ‘To My Knowledge’ Agency Didn’t Tap Google, Yahoo Data Centers Mozilla Shines A Light With Lightbeam Alleged Hacker V& In DOE, HHS Breaches MongoHQ Suffers Security Breach Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Zac, in response to Don’t Mess with Pen Test(ers). As you say, we try not to focus on or fixate on the potential risks. There are however ways to mitigate or reduce the risk. Foremost for me is to consider any and all electronic transactions to be accessible and therefore never put anything I want to keep private out of electronic records. Just like how in the past you wouldn’t speak of things you wanted to keep private today you don’t post it (Facebook is training people to do all the wrong things). And when you consider that medical offices, tax agencies, government agencies, companies all either experience breaches or just plain send your informaiton to the wrong people… let alone work at getting your informaiton. Or how snail mail post can end up in the wrong mailbox… One may as well stay home due to a fear of being hit by a car while walking the dog. tl;dr – if you want to keep something private… keep it to yourself. Share:
