[NNagain] cybersecurity is not a talent problem

Thu Nov 9 12:25:42 EST 2023

Far too many companies devolve into 'what do the auditors require' rather than 
'what makes security good, if it's good we'll pass the audits (with some 
minimal tweaking to prove what we're doing'

I've been fortunante enough to work at some places where a new audit type was 
proposed, and the security team jumped on it with glee 'these are the things 
we've been trying to do anyway', but also unfortunante enough to work at places 
where the security team did vitually nothing except respond to audits (ours and 
out customers) and had no time or resources to actually drive fixes.

David Lang

On Thu, 9 Nov 2023, David Bray, PhD wrote:

> I'd submit we also need more cyber talent - staffing Congress (or elected
> to Congress).
>
> And we need more cyber talent rotating in and out of NIST - the National
> Institutes of Standards and Technology.
>
> The reason why are three-fold:
>
> 1.) It's easy for Congress to position themselves as outraged and concerned
> if/when something goes wrong (and things will go wrong - in the case of OPM
> it was valuable information being targeted by what appears to have been PRC
> for potentially intel-related purposes) - however Congress has both the
> authorization and appropriations function. Which means they can authorize
> (and thus request) agencies to do 100+ things and appropriate funds to do
> only 25 of them. Remember that the OPM breach happened around the time that
> government had experienced the "do more with less" rubric and so sure there
> are plenty of more things they could have done - the question that you
> never see an IG nor a Congressional heading ask, was whether the agency had
> been given enough money to do all those things by their Congressional
> committees?
>
> 2.) NIST usually puts out great audience on all the things that need to be
> done to secure systems. However they're usually again missing the
> realpolitik of 100+ priorities and only funds for 25+ of them. Auditing
> firms, who usually do the work of IGs (they contract out to them) love NIST
> checklists as they can take anywhere between 8-10 months to do, tying up
> the cybersecurity and other IT Team resources of an agency's team to answer
> all the questions and reviews. Then the findings are shared - and you can
> be sure there's always "more needed here" because the auditing firm wants
> to come back next year and the IG exists to find things wrong - and usually
> the agency's management team has 2-4 months to mitigate whatever was found
> before the process will continue again next year. When we're spending more
> time auditing vs. fixing the things the audit found, I don't think that's a
> recipe for "winning"?
>
> 3.) So how do we fix this?
>
> * Rotate people from operational agencies to NIST to balance the "if you
> had perfect time, perfect budgets, and no other priorities" with the
> realpolitik of none of those things are true. Also tie this to a mechanism
> to link any IG findings of serious issues needing to be fix to an immediate
> presentation by the IG themselves to the Congress on why Congress should
> authorize and appropriate funds *now* to fix the issue asap. Yes, ask the
> IG to do this - not the poor management team who has to get dinged by the
> IG and then go to Congress and ask for funds to fix the issue - only to be
> told either not now or sure, however you still have to do these 25+ other
> things with the same budget we already gave you.
>
> * Rotate cyber talent between Congress and the Executive Branch too. This
> way Congress can learn what it's really like in the Executive Branch + the
> Exec Branch can appreciate the priorities of Congress (to include Congress
> exists to get re-elected). Also fix the fact that while there's plenty of
> "Oversight" committees for bad things, the other part of Congress - namely
> Ways and Means - does not have a forum for when things go well. It's almost
> like Congress is perfectly designed to focus on all the bad things that go
> wrong in the Executive Branch but lack any mechanisms to celebrate and
> spotlight goodness in the Executive Branch. And so this creates the
> dysfunctions - and bad perceptions - we see today.
>
> * Find ways to do cybersecurity reviews that aren't checklists. The
> checklists continue to grow - while NIST tries to do its best - things get
> more and more voluminous each year and we're now at 8-10 months for an
> audit which leaves precious little time for remediation and fixes. Require
> any annual audit done by an IG and third-party firm to not consume more
> than 1/3rd of the year to leave 2/3rd of the year for fixes before it's
> repeated again. Also deconflict the new executive order on Artificial
> Intelligence which (at 110+ pages) adds tons of new responsibilities and
> checklists to executive branch agencies - with **no** additional funding
> for this and **no** deconfliction of the existing FISMA, FITARA, and other
> annual IT audits government agencies have to do.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 9, 2023 at 4:19 AM David Lang via Nnagain <
> nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> Most of the places that I've worked, the security team have had no problem
>> identifying problems that need to be fixed faster than the rest of the
>> company
>> can fix them.
>>
>> At a few places, the Security team has been responsible for enough
>> infrastructure that they struggle to fix things as well, but not many
>> places.
>>
>> So more manpower is needed, but not necessarily where you expect it.
>>
>> David Lang
>>
>> On Wed, 8 Nov 2023, Lee via Nnagain wrote:
>>
>>> Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2023 21:26:27 -0500
>>> From: Lee via Nnagain <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>>> To: dickroy at alum.mit.edu,
>>>     Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard
>> this
>>>     time! <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>>> Cc: Lee <ler762 at gmail.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [NNagain] cybersecurity is not a talent problem
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 7:58 PM Dick Roy via Nnagain wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Yes, today one can argue that there is a shortage of talent, however
>> Paul's point was that that I s not the first problem to solve, in fact the
>> problem that must be solved first is:
>>>>
>>>> " We're in a hole, here, folks. The first thing we should do is: stop
>> digging.”
>>>>
>>>> ... and he is right IMHO!
>>>
>>> If Katherine Archuleta had enough talent to heed the warnings from the
>>> IG there's a chance there wouldn't have been a breach.  The
>>> organization should have been well past the "stop digging" phase when
>>> the breach occurred.
>>>
>>>>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lack-talent-problem-cyber-paul-vixie/
>>>>> Nothing that happened at OPM, or failed to happen at OPM, was the
>> fault of its leadership team.
>>>
>>> Wrong.  At the very least, management should have been closing the
>>> holes that had been identified.
>>>
>>> again, looking at
>>>
>> https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-OPM-Data-Breach-How-the-Government-Jeopardized-Our-National-Security-for-More-than-a-Generation.pdf
>>> on page 6
>>>
>>>  How the Breach Happened.  Despite this high value information
>>> maintained by OPM, the agency failed to prioritize cybersecurity and
>>> adequately secure high value data.  The OPM Inspector General (IG)
>>> warned since at least 2005 that the information maintained by OPM was
>>> vulnerable to hackers.
>>>
>>> The leadership team ***was warned***.  Given that they "failed to ...
>>> adequately secure high value data", how is whatever did or didn't
>>> happen at OPM _NOT_ the fault of the leadership team?
>>>
>>> I'll agree that
>>>>> Katherine Archuleta should not have had to ... be an expert on
>> "cyber" security
>>>
>>> But she _did_ need to listen to the experts that were warning her
>>> about how bad security was.  And she needed enough talent to realize
>>> that she should heed the warnings from her cyber security experts.
>>>
>>>> and also because she had a reasonable expectation that somebody,
>> somewhere, knew how completely and ruinously bad all of the IT (Information
>> Technology) in the world was, and would have told her that there was no
>> safety anywhere except on paper, in filing cabinets, guarded by the U.S.
>> Military.
>>>
>>> Seriously?  There is no absolute security so no matter how much
>>> leadership ignores warnings, or how bad the security is in the
>>> organization they're running, it's not their fault when a security
>>> breach happens?
>>> Do you really buy that?  Would you be OK with your bank or any other
>>> organization that has your PII thinking like that?
>>>
>>> speaking of which.. How do you feel about Equifax?  Oh well.. nothing
>>> that could have been done, they should have been put out of business
>>> or something in between?
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Lee
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> RR
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Nnagain [mailto:nnagain-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net] On Behalf
>> Of Lee via Nnagain
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2023 2:47 PM
>>>> To: Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard
>> this time!
>>>> Cc: Lee
>>>> Subject: Re: [NNagain] cybersecurity is not a talent problem
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 2:22 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Paul Vixie reposted this old piece of his, even more relevant today,
>> than 2015.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lack-talent-problem-cyber-paul-vixie/
>>>>
>>>> I disagree.  With a lot, but let's just go with this
>>>>> The "cyber" security problems that the US Government, and every other
>> government, and every large and medium enterprise are all coping with today
>> do not stem from lack of "cyber" talent.
>>>>
>>>> Take a look at
>>>>
>> https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-OPM-Data-Breach-How-the-Government-Jeopardized-Our-National-Security-for-More-than-a-Generation.pdf
>>>>
>>>> on page 9:
>>>>   The bottom line.  The longstanding failure of OPM's leadership to
>>>> implement basic cyber
>>>> hugiene, such as maintaining current authorities to operate and
>>>> employing strong multi-factor
>>>> authentication,  despite years of warnings from the Inspector General,
>>>> represents a failure of
>>>> culture and leadershit, not technology.
>>>>
>>>> There is no substitute for talent.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Lee
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