Security Staff Acquisition & Development

For nearly the last twenty years, enterprise security teams have been fighting threats to their business much like hapless teenagers fight demons in horror movies. Let me paint you a scene. Four people fleeing a horde of some type of evil take refuge in a run-down back woods cabin in the middle of nowhere.

By Rafal Los Managing Director, Solutons Research and Development, Optiv October 31, 2016 For nearly the last twenty years, enterprise security teams have been fighting threats to their business much like hapless teenagers fight demons in horror movies. Let me paint you a scene. Four people fleeing a horde of some type of evil take refuge in a run-down back woods cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s presumably the middle of the night and completely dark outside. They have only a few rounds in the shotgun they found in the basement. All four of the trapped have a different agenda, allegiances, and motives. The problem is they don’t really like each other all that much, but what they don’t know is it’s an all-or-nothing survival. All they have to do is make it ‘till morning.

Yesterday morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed new—and controversial—rules regarding how internet service providers (ISPs) may use customers’ “sensitive” personal data.

If you are engaged in in the information security (infosec) community for any length of time, regardless of whether you are Blue Team, Red Team, or Purple, one data point remains constant: You recognize the importance of partnering.

Last week, as much of the U.S. was inconvenienced by the widespread DDoS attack on many popular websites, Joomla! casually released a notice warning of a critical patch to its software.

Until last Friday, Internet of Things (IoT) cyber attacks were largely more theoretical than practical, at least for those outside of the cybersecurity research realm. When Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, and PayPal, among others, were taken offline or significantly slowed due to a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week.

Security teams fight many battles. There are threats, vulnerabilities, exploits, improperly configured systems, legacy equipment, lean budgets, staffing shortages, and users who are fallible. Any of these things, alone, add up to challenge, but possibly the biggest challenge security teams face is the battle between the security department and the CIO.