In the first three posts of my 2011 Research Agenda (Positivity, Posturing and RFAB, Vaulting and Assurance) I mostly talked about how we security folks need to protect our stuff from them. You know, outside attackers trying to reach our stuff. Now let’s move on to people on the inside. Although most of us prefer to focus on folks trying to break in, it’s also important to put some forethought into protecting people inside the perimeter. Whether an employee loses a device (and compromises…
In our introduction to this series we mentioned that the current practice of incident response isn’t up to dealing with the compromises and penetrations we see today. It isn’t that the incident response process itself is broken, but how companies implement response is the problem.
It’s time to post my research agenda for 2011. My long-winded Securosis compatriot has chosen a thematic approach to discussing coverage areas, and while it’s an excellent – and elegant – idea, I am getting lost amongst all of the elements presented. So unlike Mike, I won’t be presenting my coverage areas so artistically. Instead I will stick to a focus on the technology variants I hear customers askING about, as well as the trends I see within different sub-segments of the security industry.
One of the issues of being a high achiever (at least in my own mind) is that you’re always in a rush. Half the time we don’t know where we’re going, but we need to get there fast. And it results in burn-out, grumpiness, and poor job performance – which is the worst thing for someone focused on achievement. A mentor of mine saw this tendency in me early on and imprinted a thought that I still think about often: “It’s not a sprint, Mike, it’s a marathon.” Man, those words speak the truth.
Getting back to our Infrastructure Security Research Agenda for 2011 (Part 1: Positivity, Part 2: Posturing and RFAB), let’s now turn our attention to two more areas of focus. The first is ‘vaulting’, a fancy way of talking about network segmentation with additional security controls based on what you are protecting. Then we’ll touch on assurance, another fancy term for testing your stuff.
One advantage of my background is that I’ve used and marketed/sold security products, as well as followed the industry for a long time, so I see patterns over and over again. But before I jump into that, you all need to head over to Lenny Zeltser’s blog. He’s doing a lot of writing, and given the general lameness of the rest of us security bloggers, it’s nice that we have a new victim thought leader to peruse.
Over the weekend I glanced at Twitter and saw a bit of hand-wringing inspired by something going on at (I think) the Baythreat in California. This is something that’s been popping up quite a bit on Twitter and in blog posts for a while now. The core of the comments centered on the problem of educating the unwashed security masses, combined with the problems induced by a compliance mentality, and the general “they don’t understand” and “security is failing” memes.
The first of my Infrastructure Security Research Agenda 2011 posts, introducing the concept of positivity, generated a lot of discussion. Not only attached to the blog post (though the comments there were quite good), but in daily discussions with members of our extended network. Which is what a research agenda is really for. It’s a way to throw some crap against the wall and see what sticks.
Back in April I published a slightly different take on DLP: Low Hanging Fruit: Quick Wins with Data Loss Prevention. It was all about getting immediate value out of DLP while setting yourself up for a full deployment.
The Securosis team is here in San Francisco, meeting with vendors and presenting at the TechTarget Data Protection event. Weather has been reasonable and the food was awesome. But since it’s been going non-stop since something like 3:00am to (What is it now? 11:01pm) – this summary will be a short one.