There is a greater focus on speed in security delivery, as eyes fall on the information security industry.
Kicking off Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, conference founder Jeff Moss focused on speed in a year where security has the “most attention and eyeballs” on us.
He said: “This is an election year, and there is a lot happening from the OPM breach and businesses focused on this and realize their exposure, and there is legal attention from CFAA to Wassenaar, and they ask us for advice and ask what does it mean?”
In Black Hat’s largest event to date, with 108 countries represented and 194 student scholarships accepted, Moss said that he was glad that it was researchers and hackers who started this, and the likes of Microsoft and Symantec “picked up the ball”, as this shows the vital role that we have to play. “We are back in the public eye and it is important to take advantage as this is an opportunity and a cure and can be used in these conversations.”
Last year, Moss focused on the complexity curve, and said that this year’s focus is speed: technical speed to move faster than the bad guys; how fast we can spin up new deployments; and how fast we can react.
“Also business people love speed as they can measure it, as [they] cannot control the security metric, but can measure speed,” he said. “Think about how we used spend to measure what you are doing.”
Moss concluded by saying that you can incentivise people on speed, and in a recent user event “every single CIO and CISO” said that the top priority was speed, and speed to market to better reflect the mobile environment.
“I was stunned as it is top of the list for the largest companies. We want to speak their language, but speed is in our dictionary and a race car is an analogy as we put brakes on so they can go faster – we’re the brakes and if we take risk we can go faster,” he said.