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\[59:51\] Because I do see kind of separate communities, and sometimes they even look at each other with the side-eye, which is kind of strange... There are those who float in-between, "I feel like I've kind of done a little bit of that, sit in the middle..." But I think if we can get the software developers more equip... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yeah, so I think you asked a great question, and you started providing an answer in the right direction. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Neil Daswani:** So I think the all traditional view is you have the development team and you have the information security team, and they're separate teams. And that old model, like the information security team can be perceived of as like the Department of No, which is not what you want, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Neil Daswani:** I think a more modern view, a better view is that the information security team exists to serve enablement of the business, and the philosophical approach should be "Yes, and how." "Yes, we want to launch. How do we do that in a way that mitigates risk?" I think that the mentality should be "Yes, and ... |
And within an information security team you may have an application security team or a product security team, and I think that team should be staffed with people who used to be engineers and developers solely. I myself, I'm a software engineer in my background; my first job at Bell Communications Research years ago was... |
The goal of the application security team should be to enable the developers to be able to write code securely, and give them the tools and frameworks that they need to write code securely, such that they can monitor it, but don't necessarily need to be an approval gate. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Neil Daswani:** So if the application security team can say "Bring observability tools like DeepFactor and get folks to use those tools", then developers can monitor the security of their own software themselves, and perhaps all that stuff can be aggregated together so that a CSO can look at the full picture and try ... |
Another model that I've seen worked well is if you're a larger engineering organization and a relatively small application security team, what you can do is encourage one of the developers and each of the development teams to kind of be the local securities arm, where they go through some training, maybe they know more... |
So I think that we can set up models like that... It's a much more progressive, collaborative way in which to go about achieving a more secure software than what exists otherwise with a more traditional model. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:04:02.19\] Yeah, I like that. And I know -- I mean, that's inside specific organizations, which is really where we mostly operate. I've seen also where we operate kind of in the online spaces out there in the communities... There's been efforts to bridge these gaps. I appreciate people who are try... |
I don't like that particular dev-sec-ops term, because it's kind of strange, but I appreciate the movement there, and the efforts being put in place to really break down that divide and build better products together. |
**Neil Daswani:** I think that collaboration is key in order to result in more security, and more resilience, and more fault-tolerance, and all kinds of other good things that comes out of the collaboration. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, something you mentioned earlier, Jerod, to this divide between these two camps, or maybe three camps (based on dev-sec-ops), is the collaboration happens when respect and empathy are in place. So if as a developer I can empathize with my security counterparts, or as a security counterpart I ca... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It's a difficult situation, because on the face of it, one person is writing the code, and the other person is trying to break into that code. Just by what you're tasked to do, you're kind of set at odds with each other, aren't you? Because one person's exploit is somebody else's vulnerable softw... |
What about these other vectors/ways that we can fight things, like unencrypted data, third-party compromise...? That one seems so difficult, and something that is happening more and more now that we have all these mergers happening. I just can't imagine bringing in a third party through a merger or something, and now y... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's true. |
**Jerod Santo:** What are some ways that you can combat or guard against third-party compromise? |
**Neil Daswani:** I'd be happy to comment on that. But before I do, I just wanted to comment -- you know, we talked about things like respect and empathy being important in between teams... I just wanted to chime in with one additional characteristic. I think the characteristic of accountability is important. I think t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:08:17.00\] Right. Because they're accountable to secure software, not putting a security flaw in there. So putting a security flaw in there is a by-product of just making software; it's gonna happen. Bugs, they're gonna happen. A flaw is gonna happen, something's gonna happen, but the accountab... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yes, yes. That's exactly right. I think though if you look at very large organizations, like banks for instance, where they're regulated by all kinds of regulators, I think there's another aspect of this, where the security team usually becomes the one that has to report information into what eventual... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Neil Daswani:** To go on to the second part of the question, with regards to some of the other root causes, we chatted about various kinds of third parties, and we chatted about malware - let me just give one example that comes to mind. In the book we have a chapter on the Marriott breach, in which 383 million custom... |
The reason that occurred was because Marriott acquired Starwood, and the combination of the two basically was gonna make the world's largest hotel chain. And it turned out that Starwood had been compromised by a piece of malware a year before the acquisition talks even started. The malware footprint and reach had not b... |
In both Marriott's and Starwood's case there was a lot of susceptibility to malware... But I mention that because it's an example where -- there's many kinds of third parties. Third parties are not always just suppliers. Third parties can be entire companies. And with regards to advice to deal with that, one of the thi... |
\[01:12:15.00\] You're looking for different kinds of evidence; you're looking for are there \[unintelligible 01:12:17.09\] files somewhere in the environment that might already have been aggregated by attackers and have all this tooling data in it? Are there binaries that have hashes that might be indicators of attack... |
Perhaps if Marriott had done such an exercise on Starwood before the acquisition, they might have identified that there was already a breach that took place, and that would have impacted the acquisition discussions. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe a good place to close would be this word you mentioned, accountability... You mentioned it from a teammate aspect. But I would imagine that there's some accountability in terms of due diligence to say, in this case, Marriott and Starwood... Marriott being accountable to do necessary due dilige... |
**Neil Daswani:** First of all, I'd be happy to speak to it. I'll of course caveat what I'll say here -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're not a lawyer... |
**Neil Daswani:** ...I'm not a lawyer. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Opinion-only... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Opinion only, yeah. |
**Neil Daswani:** As a former CSO, I've worked together with a lot of attorneys and general counsels at both companies at which I have been a CSO, and let me mention that I think that there have been strides in accountability over the years. So if we go back to the target breach in 2013, after the target breach it was ... |
In one of the book chapters I encourage folks to have their chief security officer report to the CEO, because at the end of the day if something goes wrong, that CEO is gonna be held accountable. The days where a CEO can't say "Oh, we had a breach. It's the CSO that should get fired." Well, that's not necessarily the c... |
In fact, if we look at other breaches -- if we look at the Equifax breach, there was a change in CEO and CSO there as well. So the accountability has gone all the way to the top. I think that board members need to be asking their CEOs the right questions. The CEOs need to be also asking the right questions if they don'... |
Security is not just an IT problem. I think that it could be the case that if some companies have a CSO that's still reporting to the CIO - well, the important thing to realize there is that security is not just an IT problem, it's much broader than that. So there has been an increase in the accountability. CEOs have g... |
\[01:16:20.14\] By the way, I don't know that the accountability has gone all the way to the bottom, and I'm actually not quite sure that's the right way to go. I think that, for instance in the Equifax breach, the CEO tried to pin it on somebody who was supposed to patch that Apache Struts server. But I think that's h... |
By the way, you should have automated patching for that number of machines. I think relying on humans to do patching is likely to fail... So you've gotta also then understand that when you're operating at any level of scale, you need to have automated technical verification that the patch got successfully deployed, and... |
I think that in terms of \[unintelligible 01:17:33.25\] accountability, I would put the onus on the CIOs and the CSOs, to say "Look, you guys need to have a scalable, systematic, automated approach to things like patching, with \[unintelligible 01:17:46.29\] verification", because I think that the days where we should ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Definitely a troubling scenario, given the breaches that have happened, the data breaches and whatnot... It's an interesting, I suppose ever-changing world, cybersecurity, cyber-crime... But Neil, thank you so much for writing the book, for everyone. This isn't just simply for security researchers o... |
**Neil Daswani:** Yeah, thank you for having me. Both Moudy, my co-author and myself, we had a great time writing the book on "Big Breaches: Cybersecurity Lessons for Everyone." My hope is that the book will be a good contribution to the field, that will help bring more people into it. I think there's enough security b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I agree. Change begins with awareness, and awareness begins with books, so thank you |
**Jerod Santo:** Thanks, Neil. This was awesome. |
**Neil Daswani:** You're welcome. |
• Linus Lee's personal background and interests, including his language creation project and side projects |
• Monocle and Ink, a personal universal search engine and programming language, respectively |
• Linus Lee's approach to side projects, which are created for personal use and to learn new things |
• The relationship between Linus Lee's side projects and his day job at Ideaflow |
• The benefits and limitations of creating side projects, including the ability to experiment and iterate quickly without consequences |
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