Jesse Trucks is the Minister of Magic at Splunk, where he consults on security and compliance program designs and develops Splunk architectures for security use cases, among other things. He brings more than 20 years of experience in tech to this role, having previously worked as director of security and compliance at Peak Hosting, a staff member at freenode, a cybersecurity engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a systems engineer at D.E. Shaw Research, among several other positions. Of course, Jesse is also the host of Meanwhile in Security, the podcast about better cloud security you’re about to listen to.

Links:

• "What is an Attack Surface? (And How to Reduce it)": And How to Reduce ithttps://www.okta.com/identity-101/what-is-an-attack-surface/
•  "Developing Cyber Resilient Systems: A Systems Security Engineering Approach": https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-160/vol-2/final

Transcript

Jesse: Welcome to Meanwhile in Security where I, your host Jesse Trucks, guides you to better security in the cloud.

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Jesse: There’s a constant daily show of security-related news from all directions. It’s a storm that never abates. Sifting through it all feels daunting to most people, including many security professionals. We need a strategy to sort it all out and focus on the things that matter, as quickly as we can. [laugh]. The easy and terrifying answer is just to subscribe to all the newsletters for everything your organization uses or your group manages; go read the articles they point to, and [laugh] give up because it’s total information overload.

For some security people, this approach does make sense and it works; except the whole giving up part, of course. However, if this isn’t useful for most of us. As with anything driven by business needs, understanding how to find and evaluate useful security news starts with knowing your business. Whatever your role, you should understand how your work supports and furthers the organizational mission.

Understanding your mission leads to understanding your risks, therefore you will know your role in risk mitigation. This leads to understanding how and why your technological solutions both support your mission and mitigate your risks to that mission. Now, let’s look at how this foundational understanding of your business drives your consumption and evaluation of security news.

News strategy. It should be obvious that the role you and your technology have relative to the mission and risks determine the choosing of both the types and the sources of security news you should read. It is tempting to focus only on cloud-specific sources and topics, but running in the cloud does not obviate the need for the security of your systems, applications, and data. It is also true that ignoring cloud-specific security news is a bad idea. To determine which to focus on first or most, look at the likely exposure your infrastructure has in terms of your risks.

For example, if your application delivers the services of your business to external customers as opposed to an internal employees’ service, then most people will interact primarily with your application services presented by your systems. Your largest attack surface would be your service application, the data presented and used by your application, the operating system or microservice platform supporting your application, and the network infrastructure to tie it all together. We define attack surface as the collective group of services, systems, or data exposed to access by a potential adversary. In other words, if something can be touched on the network, it is part of the attack surface for initial intrusion. And if something on the system can be touched by local access, it is part of the attack surface for an attacker who has gained access beyond the network resources.

This means most of us have a primary or larger attack surface in the application and systems exposed in services delivery, and our cloud infrastructure underneath and supporting our systems and services is likely a secondary or smaller attack surface. For more reading on attack services, check out Okta’s article called “What is an Attack Surface? (And How to Reduce it)” and read some attention to the topic in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST Special Publication 800-160, Volume Two called “Developing Cyber Resilient Systems: A Systems Security Engineering Approach.” Wow, that’s a mouthful.

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It is generally the case for most people and organizations that non-cloud-specific news will provide the most return on our investment of time upfront, though this changes once processing and acting upon general security news become streamlined. Now, let’s talk about how to determine the usefulness of the news we encounter.

Evaluating news. Most of us would head straight to industry sources to see what the biggest news of the day is, but I suggest a different approach to triage your news needs. First, look at mainstream news sources such as the New York Times Washington Post, and the Guardian or even NPR, CNN, and BBC. Is there cybersecurity-related news showing up in many or all of these sources? If there is big news, it will be all over it with original source articles, and even articles summarizing those other news sources.

This will likely give you a general idea of the service or technology affected, which helps you determine whether further research is required to understand the impact it may have on your organization. These sources may not clarify what specific technical services or systems are involved, however. Once you found these big news items, search in the tech industry-focused sources to get more relevant detail that isn’t over-simplified for larger public audience. If there isn’t a big...