Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

What CSOs can Learn from Pete Carroll

If you listen to the security echo chamber, after an embarrassing failure like a data breach, you lose your job, right? Let’s look at Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll, who made what the home town paper called the “Worst Play Call Ever.” With less than a minute to go in the Superbowl, and the game hanging […]

 

Academic job opening at Cambridge

At Light Blue Touchpaper, Ross Anderson says “We have a vacancy for a postdoc to work on the psychology of cybercrime and deception for two years from October.” I think this role has all sorts of fascinating potential, and wanted to help get the word out in my own small way.

 

Your career is over after a breach? Another Myth, Busted!

I’m a big fan of learning from our experiences around breaches. Claims like “your stock will fall”, or “your customers will flee” are shown to be false by statistical analysis, and I expect we’d see the same if we looked at people losing their jobs over breaches. (We could do this, for example, via LinkedIn […]

 

Top 5 Security Influencers of 2011

I really like Gunnar Peterson’s post on “Top 5 Security Influencers:” Its December and so its the season for lists. Here is my list of Top 5 Security Influencers, this is the list with the people who have the biggest (good and/or bad) influence on your company and user’s security: My list is slightly different: […]

 

The Diginotar Tautology Club

I often say that breaches don’t drive companies out of business. Some people are asking me to eat crow because Vasco is closing its subsidiary Diginotar after the subsidiary was severely breached, failed to notify their reliant parties, mislead people when they did, and then allowed perhaps hundreds of thousands of people to fall victim […]

 

15 Years of Software Security: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Fifteen years ago, I posted a copy of “Source Code Review Guidelines” to the web. I’d created them for a large bank, because at the time, there was no single document on writing or reviewing for security that was broadly available. (This was a about four years before Michael Howard and Dave LeBlanc published Writing […]

 

Communicating with Executives for more than Lulz

On Friday, I ranted a bit about “Are Lulz our best practice?” The biggest pushback I heard was that management doesn’t listen, or doesn’t make decisions in the best interests of the company. I think there’s a lot going on there, and want to unpack it. First, a quick model of getting executives to do […]

 

Would a CISO benefit from an MBA education?

If a CISO is expected to be an executive officer (esp. for a large, complex technology- or information-centered organization), then he/she will need the MBA-level knowledge and skill. MBA is one path to getting those skills, at least if you are thoughtful and selective about the school you choose. Other paths are available, so it’s not just about an MBA credential.

Otherwise, if a CISO is essentially the Most Senior Information Security Manager, then MBA education wouldn’t be of much value.

 

A Letter from Sid CRISC – ious

In the comments to “Why I Don’t Like CRISC” where I challenge ISACA to show us in valid scale and in publicly available models, the risk reduction of COBIT adoption, reader Sid starts to get it, but then kinda devolves into a defense of COBIT or something.  But it’s a great comment, and I wanted […]

 

Don't fight the zeitgeist, CRISC Edition

Some guy recently posted a strangely self-defeating link/troll/flame in an attempt to (I think) argue with Alex and/or myself regarding the relevance or lack thereof of ISACA’s CRISC certification.  Now given that I think he might have been doing it to drive traffic to his CRISC training site, I won’t show him any link love […]

 

CRISC -O

PREFACE:  You might interpret this blog post as being negative about risk management here, dear readers.  Don’t. This isn’t a diatrabe against IRM, only why “certification” around information risk is a really, really silly idea. Apparently, my blog about why I don’t like the idea of CRISC has long-term stickiness.  Just today, Philip writes in […]

 

A personal announcement

I will be entering the PhD program in Computational Social Science (with certificates in InfoSec and Economic Systems Design) at George Mason University, Fairfax VA, starting in the Fall of 2010.

 

How to Get Started In Information Security, the New School Way

There have been a spate of articles lately with titles like “The First Steps to a Career in Information Security” and “How young upstarts can get their big security break in 6 steps.” Now, neither Bill Brenner nor Marisa Fagan are dumb, but both of their articles miss the very first step. And it’s important […]

 

On the Assimilation Process

Three years and three days ago I announced that “I’m Joining Microsoft.” While I was interviewing, my final interviewer asked me “how long do you plan to stay?” I told him that I’d make a three year commitment, but I really didn’t know. We both knew that a lot of senior industry people have trouble […]