Writing

Security Blog

  • CISOs are still chiefs in name only
    CISOs are still chiefs in name only

    If you’re not in the meeting where decisions are made, then you’re not part of the C-Suite—whatever your title may be. Look around the CISO community, and you’ll find signs of burnout everywhere.   Where CISOs aren’t just quitting, you’ll find increasing tension between them and their executives, sometimes resulting in surprising departures. Ply a friendly CISO with…

  • Drop the SBOM
    Drop the SBOM

    Software bills of material are having a moment, but the costs of an externally visible SBOM are likely to outweigh the benefits, says Andy Ellis. There’s a big movement afoot to move to an SBOM-oriented world.  If you’re new to this acronym, an SBOM is a “Software Bill of Materials.”  The idea is that any…

  • Vulnerabilities don’t count
    Vulnerabilities don’t count

    No one outside the IT department cares about your vulnerability metrics (or they shouldn’t, anyway). They care about efficacy. And traditional stats don’t show that. I had a lovely chat with one of my favorite CISOs the other day, helping them think through the security metrics that they report upwards.  Front and center, as I…

  • Three Hidden Security Costs Behind Many Failed Projects

    As a long-time CISO, I’ve been on the receiving end of … a lot of vendor sales pitches. So much so that I created a quick template to respond to all of those unsolicited messages. For the most part, vendors would either quietly disappear, or reply with good grace (for many sales development representatives, even being acknowledged…

  • The Fourth Dimension of Risk Management

    When security professionals talk about risk, especially with business executives, we often use metaphors rooted in the physical world. We might talk about coverage, and compare it to the length of a wall that surrounds a group of assets. Perhaps we talk about the height of the wall, to consider how comprehensive our defenses are.…

  • Four considerations for improving cloud security hygiene

    We think we understand what hygiene is, but what about cloud security hygiene?  It’s not like our computers have teeth to brush.  Although, if you have a child, you might be familiar with the challenges involved in even basic hygiene.  Some of us might even have had conversations like this: “Did you brush your teeth?”“Yes!”You smell in…

  • Risk at the Margin

    Humans are, generally, pretty awesome at risk management.  Why, then, do we seem to be so bad at it – and in so many different ways – when it comes to assessing risk in the CoViD era? Risk Models First, let’s talk about how humans make most risk decisions.  Risk comes in a lot of different flavors…

  • Understanding Risk

    Operating or overseeing a business –  whether it’s as a director, executive, or manager – requires an understanding of risk, and especially how it impacts your strategy.  But risk is a nebulous concept.  It means something different to everyone, so it helps to levelset not just on a working definition of risk, but on approaches…

  • Football. CoViD-19, and distributed systems hazards

    Looking at the latest trickle of Covid-19 cases in the NFL – specifically in the Patriots locker room – it strikes me that some of the challenges of public health safety are strikingly similar to the issues of distributed system safety in computer systems, and each can help highlight important lessons in the other. Caveats: …

  • One company’s successful approach to gender balance

    In an industry where 10-15% of staff are women, the InfoSec team at Akamai—a cybersecurity, content-delivery network and cloud-service provider—is now 40% women. Driving that change—from 28% two years ago—took only a few, simple practices that might work in many other organizations. We drove those changes in partnership between the talent-acquisition team and the hiring managers;…

Leadership Newsletter

  • Inspiration as a Shield
    Inspiration as a Shield

    Leadership Moment: Shields Down Talking with a startup CEO recently, they shared the story of one of their principal software engineers who had just left to join an even earlier stage startup. On the surface, it seemed like a reasonable career choice: after learning that they had what it took to be a key contributor… Read this …

  • Too Much Deference to Blind Compliance
    Too Much Deference to Blind Compliance

    Leadership Moment: Choice isn’t Frozen There are times when an organization wants to demonstrate bold leadership on as issue, as the Paris Olympic Committee did when it decided to use geothermal cooling systems instead of more effective air conditioners. Unfortunately for the POC, they didn’t anticipate the entirely predictable consequence: that many countries would bring… Read this …

  • Smooth Power Differentials
    Smooth Power Differentials

    Leadership Moment: Asymmetric Communication Checking into hotels has become increasingly automated. For a recent hotel stay, I received a WhatsApp message from the hotel asking me to provide some pre-checkin information, to smooth the check-in process (reading between the lines: reduce the cost to the hotel to check me in with a human). After a… Read this …

Fiction