About those degrees…

There is a meme going around related to the Equifax hack that points out an executive in charge of security doesn’t have a degree related to security.
Surprise! A lot of the folks who currently keep us safe on the internet don’t have degrees in security. They just didn’t exist when we were in school. I think Paul summed it up best:

[T]alking about Susan Mauldin’s music degree is a socially acceptable way for men (and they’re almost all men) to vent about a woman who they don’t feel belongs in their workplace – especially not in a senior role. That truth is simply unavoidable.

Paul’s article over on Security Ledger is well worth a read looking at security professionals and what their credentials are. Also, a summary of the discussions happening in various online fora about her and the breach.
On my Facebook feed, there have been a lot of discussions. It’s interesting because many of my friends are experts in security and/or internet technology. Some have degrees in relevant studies, but a lot are self taught. They are the embodiment of Chris Robert’s quote in Paul’s article.

“So many of us in security have worked our way in and clawed our way up and we stand on the experience that we have and build on the experience of others,” noted security expert Chris Roberts (@sidragon1) told [Paul]. “This realm we’ve created over the last 20+ years has only recently lent itself to certification and most of us have the scars and bruises from so many years of experience which arguably counts for as much if not more in some cases.”

Anti-abuse and deliverability are even newer field than security and they don’t have much in the way of certification, either. But most of us working in the field do have the scars and bruises from experience.
We are living in the future. Those of us who are creating the future are doing the best we can. Sometimes that means we have a degree in music. This doesn’t make us unqualified.
 

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The Cyber and The Security

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I’ve been on multiple calls with different groups over the last few weeks discussing the implications of the subscription attack and how it was carried out. The majority of my focus is email and how to protect senders from becoming a conduit for abuse. Other folks participating on the call are looking at what abuse is out there and how to stop it or minimize it.
One thing that came up on a recent call is that the bulk of dDOS traffic that took Brian Krebs’ website down was from various Internet of Things devices. Security cameras, DVD players, televisions, lightbulbs and other connected devices were part of the problem. It’s a huge issue, and one that cannot simply be mitigated by just ISPs and providers. But convincing individuals to secure their lightbulbs can be a challenge, we can’t even protect their computers completely. Convincing companies to stop providing default usernames and passwords or using the same keys for every device is another challenge.
These are big issues that we’re going to have to deal with.
Last night, with 100 million of my virtual friends and a small group of local ones, I watched the first Presidential debate. Part of the debate was about cyber security. To misquote Vice President Biden, “Cybersecurity is a big freaking deal.” We have nation states, and groups with the resources of nation states, conducting covert operations online. We have hacking, compromises, bonnets and other malicious activity occurring every, single day. And, the more complex the site and the more users it has the more likely it is to be compromised. Cybersecurity is a critical part of national security and our own individual security. We must take it seriously and we must address it.
Now, I’ll be honestI don’t think there is a solution to the problem. I think, though, that there are hundreds of things we can do as individuals, as companies, as nations, as volunteer organizations, as NGOs and as coalitions to solve different parts of the problem. We all need to think about what it is and who’s doing the bad stuff.
It’s common to think of hackers as lonely boys in basements who have too much time and too little to do. Back in the ancient days of the spam wars some folks referred to them as “chickenboners“: beer drinking rednecks who ate fried chicken and threw the bones on the floors of their trailers. The reality even then, though, was that many spammers ran businesses and made a lot of money. Admittedly, the descriptions of how the business was run are cringe inducing and full of illegal activity.
Now, much of the hacking is actually organized crime outside the US. This makes it hard to address successfully through legal channels.
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https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/897931383431061504
https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/897932050111406081
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