Catching you up here with some of the Gov 2.0 kids.  Steve Radick wrote an interesting blog post about Government 2.0.  And I’m thinking “damn, right on!”  Now don’t get me wrong here, sometimes I’m critical of the Gov 2.0 crowd because it seems like about half the time they’re throwing technology and data at people seeing what will stick instead of asking the non-IT program managers what information they need to have to do their job right.  But in this case, Steve’s blog post does have relevancy for Government IT security folks.

At this point, you’re probably thinking “But Mr Rybolov, how the heck does this relate to IT security and the Government?” and you’re definitely right to ask.  Well, way back in the halcyon days of last year, I came to a realization that tactical and technical security solutions come from the bottom and that compliance and regulation come from the top.  I even built a model about it.  One of the implied problem areas is that if your management model goes “top-down”, then it gets filtered through bureaucracy.

I was at an AFCEA awards banquet trying to pretend that I wasn’t really a reformed infantryman (think “professional troll”) when Roger Baker gave an awesome talk about “practicing random acts of defiance of the bureaucracy”.  I think there’s a bit of genius in that statement.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog: as a regular Joe not in the Government, I’m reasonably free to talk about the successes and failures of my friends in the Government where they can’t.

Hence my grand unified theory on life, the universe, and everything else: the InfoSec career field is a lot more like soccer or law enforcement than football and the court system–sometimes we depend on the most junior people who are operating semi-autonomously within their assigned sector.  But my point (I know, you’re wondering when I’ll get there) to this whole post is that if we’re going to have a decentralized industry, we also bear the responsibility to train our folks to operate independently and to have the skillset to be well-rounded enough to work in a wide variety of situations.

• An Open Letter to NIST About SP 800-30
• Evolution of Penetration Testing: Part 1
• Database Activity Monitoring for the Government
• Transparency in Government: Just Give us the Data!
• Random Thoughts on “The FISMA Challenge” in eHealthcare

Ah yes, I’ve explained this about a hundred times this week (at that thing that I can’t blog about, but @McKeay @MikD and @Sawaba were there so fill in the gaps), thought I should get this down somewhere.

the 3 factors that determine how much money you will make (or lose) in a consulting practice:

• Bill Rate: how much do you charge your customers.  This is pretty familiar to most folks.
• Utilization: what percentage of your employees’ time is spent being billable.  The trick here is if you can get them to work 50 hours/week because then they’re at 125% utilization and suspiciously close to “uncompensated overtime”, a concept I’ll maybe explain in the future.
• Leverage: the ratio of bosses to worker bees.  More experienced people are more expensive to have as employees.  Usually a company loses money on these folks because the bill rate is less than what they are paid.  Conversely, the biggest margin is on work done by junior folks.  A highly leveraged ratio is 1:25, a lowly leveraged ratio is 1:5 or even less.

Site Assessment photo by punkin3.14.

And then we have the security assessments business and security consulting in general.  Let’s face it, security assessments are a commodity market.  What this means is that since most competitors in the assessment space charge the same amount (or at least relatively close to each other), this means some things about the profitability of an assessment engagement:

• Assuming a Firm Fixed Price for the engagement, the Effective Bill Rate is inversely proportionate to the amount of hours you spend on the project.  IE, $30K/60 hours=$500/hour and 30K/240 hours = $125/hour.  I know this is a shocker, but the less amount of time you spend on an assessment, the bigger your margin but you would also expect the quality to suffer.
• Highly leveraged engagements let you keep margin but over time the quality suffers.  1:25 is incredibly lousy for quality but awesome for profit.  If you start looking at security assessment teams, they’re usually 1:4 or 1:5 which means that the assessment vendor is getting squeezed on margin.
• Keeping your people engaged as much as possible gives you that extra bit of margin.  Of course, if they’re spending 100% of their time on the road, they’ll get burned out really quickly.  This is not good for both staff longevity (and subsequent recruiting costs) and for work quality.

Now for the questions that this raises for me:

• Is there a 2-tier market where there are ninjas (expensive, high quality) and farmers (commodity prices, OK quality)?
• How do we keep audit/assessment quality up despite economic pressure?  IE, how do we create the conditions where the ninja business model is viable?
• Are we putting too much trust in our auditors/assessors for what we can reasonably expect them to perform successfully?
• How can any information security framework focused solely on audit/assessment survive past 5 years? (5-10 years is the SWAG time on how long it takes a technology to go from “nobody’s done this before” to “we have a tool to automate most of it”)
• What’s the alternative?

• Security Assessment Economics
• Split-Horizon Assessments and the Oversight Effect
• Security Assessments as Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
• The CyberArmy You Have…
• How to Not Let FISMA Become a Paperwork Exercise

It’s at the end of September, check it out.  Even if you’re not in the vulnerability/patch rat race on a daily basis, it would “behoove” you to go check out what’s new.  If you’ve been paying attention to OMB Memo 10-15, you’ll notice that Cyberscope takes some SCAP input.

• Save a Kitten, Write SCAP Content
• Ed Bellis’s Little SCAP Project
• Security Automation Developers Conference Slides
• Federated Vulnerability Management
• NIST and SCAP; Busting a cap on intruders Part 1

For some reason, “Rebuilding C&A” has been a perennial traffic magnet for me for a year or so now.  Seeing how that particular post was written in 2007, I find this an interesting stat.  Maybe I hit all the SEO terms right.  Or maybe the zeitgeist of the Information Assurance community is how to do it right.  Anyway, if you’re in Government and information security, it might be worthwhile to check out this old nugget of wisdom from yesteryear.

• Some Comments on SP 800-39
• GAO’s 5 Steps to “Fix” FISMA
• Old Saint NIST: Ho Ho Hold on, what’s this?
• “Machines Don’t Cause Risk, People Do!”
• Clouds, FISMA, and the Lawyers

Metricon 5 was this week, it was a blast you should have been there.

One of the things the program committee worked on was more of a practitioner focus.  I think the whole event was a good mix between theory and application and the overall blend was really, really good. Talking to the speakers before the event was much awesome as I could give them feedback on their talk proposal and then see how that conversation led to an awe-inspiring presentation.

I brought a couple security manager folks I know along with me and their opinion was that the event was way awesome. If you’re one of my blog readers and didn’t hunt me down and say hi, then whatcha waitin’ for, drop me an email and we’ll chat.

You can go check out the slides and papers at the Security Metrics site.

My slides are below.  I’m not sure if I was maybe a bit too far “out there” (I do that from time to time) but what I’m really looking for is a scorecard so that we can consciously build regulation and compliance frameworks instead of the way we’ve been doing it. This would help tremendously with public policy, industry self-regulation, and anybody who is trying to build their own framework.

• Massively Scaled Security Solutions for Massively Scaled IT
• Why We Need PCI-DSS to Survive
• DojoCon 2009 Presentation
• Building A Modern Security Policy For Social Media and Government
• Professor Rybolov’s Guide to InfoSec and Public Policy Analysis

Going Off the Deep End

So I was thinking the other day (this is the part where people who know me in person usually go “oh cr*p”), partially spurred by a conversation I had with @csoandy and @secbarbie a couple of months ago.  I’ll get the idea out there: as an industry we need to embrace the concept of split-horizon assessments.

Two Purposes for Assessments

Because this is an insane approach that I’m just feeling out, let me go on a solo riff and explain what I’m talking about.  You see, I have two distinct purposes for getting a security assessment, both of which are in contention with each other:

• I want to fix my security by asking for money to fix the things that need attention.  When I get an assessment for this purpose, enumeration of my badness/suckness is good.  If I have a set of results that say that everything is great, then there’s no need for me to be given any more resources (time, money, people, gear).  Short-term, I’m fine, but what about my infrastructure-type long-term projects?  The net effect of a highly-scored annual assessment just might kill my program in 2 years as my funding and people are shifted elsewhere, especially in a .
• I want to keep my job and help my {company|agency|group} stay out of trouble by showing my zero-defects face and by demonstrating my due-diligence in protecting what has been given to me.  While the assessor has helped me short-term by identifying my problems and being a total hardass, if I’m not around in 6 months to adopt the recommendations into my security program, has the assessor actually helped me?

And this is the dilemma for just about every security manager out there.  One of the strategies is to alternate assessment types, but then your management wonder just what the heck it is you’re doing because you’re on top one year, then on the bottom the next.

Split Rock Lighthouse and Horizon photo by puliarf.

Assessor Window-Shopping

Now for the dirty little secret of the testing business:  there are really good testers who are the ninjas of the InfoSec world and there are really bad testers who don’t even validate their unlicensed Nessus scan.  I know, you’re shocked and it’s so blindingly obvious that Bruce Schneier will blog it 3 years from now.  =)

But there’s the part that you didn’t know:  security managers pick their assessor depending on the political mood inside their organization.  This is nowhere near a science, from what I’ve seen it involves a lot of navel-gazing on the part of the security team to see which is the lesser evil: having everybody think you’re incompetent or never getting anything new ever again?

Building a Better Rat Race

In order to accomplish both of the goals that I’ve listed, what I really need is a split-horizon assessment.  In other words, I need 2 reports from one assessment with different views for different audiences.  I know this sounds highly cynical, but it’s something we’ve been doing for some time now but just informally.  Might as well make it formal.

So are you sold on this concept yet?  In true form, I have an idea on how to get to a world of split-horizon assessments.  You can take any catalog of controls and divide it into “gotta have it” and “nice to have” (I almost divide these along the lines of “vulnerability mitigation” and “sustainable security program” or the “CISO” and “OMB and Congress”) buckets.  Then in your compliance assessment standard, require 2 reports for each assessment.  One is reported to the regulating authority and the other stays with the organization.

Indecision Strikes

I don’t know if I’ve solved the problemspace or not, but I’m looking for feedback “from the Peanut Gallery” so leave some comments.

• Security Assessment Economics
• Engagement Economics and Security Assessments
• Workin’ for the ‘Counters: an Analysis of my Love-Hate Relationship with the CPAs
• Security Assessments as Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
• A Funny Thing Happened Last Week on Capital Hill