A practical approach
Chief Information Security Officer Workshop is a collection of on-demand videos and slide decks from Microsoft aimed to help CISOs defend a hybrid enterprise (that now includes cloud platforms) from increasingly sophisticated attacks.
As many organisations are recognising and experiencing first-hand, cyber-attacks are no longer a matter of if, but when. Recent cyber breaches at major corporations highlight the increasing sophistication, stealth, and persistence of cyber-attacks that organisations are facing today. These breaches are resulting in increased regulatory and business impact.
I’ve been named a finalist for the 2020 Cyber Security Awards.
I’m excited to make the shortlist for the Personality of the Year category. The award recognises thought leadership, commitment to developing others and raising the profile of cyber security among businesses.
I had a chance to contribute to a free eBook by Cisco on adapting to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. Check it out for advice on securing your remote workforce, improving security culture, adjusting your processes and more.
The Software and Security Engineering course taught at the University of Cambridge is available for free online. It includes video lectures, slide decks, reading materials and more.
Whether you are new to information security or a seasoned professional, this course will help you build solid foundations.
Lecture 9 covering critical systems is my favourite. It bring together previous discussions on psychology, usability and software engineering in the context of safety. It adds to the array of the case studies from Lecture 6, focusing on software failures and what we can learn from them. It also offers a fascinating analysis of the Therac-25 accidents and Boeing 737 Max crashes.
I recently completed this AWS Machine Learning course on Coursera (it’s free!). Besides covering basic theory behind machine learning, it discusses common use cases and how AWS services can be applied to them. Overall, it’s quite quick, interesting and doesn’t require deep technical skills.
Developing a resilient business is about identifying what your business can’t afford to lose and planning for how to prevent loss should a disaster occur. While this may seem a daunting task, determining your business’s resiliency strategy is more straightforward than you might think.
This resilience toolkit developed by Facebook provides a framework for small businesses that may not have the time or resources to create an extensive plan to recover from business interruptions.
You don’t have to use Facebook’s crisis response features for this approach to be effective – the value comes from the taking the time to assess the risks and plan you response strategy.
Oil & Gas has always been an industry affected by a wide range of geopolitical, economical and technological factors. The energy transition is one of the more recent macro trends impacting every player in the sector.
Companies are adjusting their business models and reorganising their organisational structures to prepare for the shift to renewable energy. They are becoming more integrated, focusing on consumers’ broader energy needs all the while reducing carbon emissions and addressing sustainability concerns.
To enable this, the missing capabilities get acquired and unwanted assets get divested. Cyber security has a part to play during divestments. preventing business disruption and data leaks during handover. In acquisition scenarios, supporting due diligence and secure integration becomes a focus.
Digital transformation is also high on many boards’ agenda. While cyber security experts are still grappling with the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) domains, new solutions are being tried out: drones are monitoring for environmental issues, data is being collected from IoT sensors and crunched in the Cloud with help of machine learning. These are deployed alongside existing legacy systems in the geographically distributed infrastructure, adding complexity and increasing attack surface.
It’s hard, it seems, to still get the basics right. Asset control, vulnerability and patch management, network segregation, supply chain risks and poor governance are the problems still waiting to be solved.
The price for neglecting security can be high: devastating ransomware crippling global operations, industrial espionage and even a potential loss of human life as demonstrated by recent cyberattacks.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There are many things to be hopeful for. Oil & Gas is an industry with a strong safety culture. The same processes are often applied in both an office and an oil rig. People will actually intervene and tell you off if you are not holding the handrail or carrying a cup of coffee without a lid.
To be effective, cyber security needs to build on and plug into these safety protocols. In traditional IT environments, confidentiality is often prioritised. Here, safety and availability are critical. Changing the mindset, and adopting safety-related principles (like ALARP: as low as resonantly practicable) and methods (like Bowtie to visualise cause and consequence relationships in incident scenarios) when managing risk is a step in the right direction.
Photo by Jonathan Cutrer.
I previously wrote about how to prepare for the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exams. Today, I would like to focus on AWS Security – Specialty.
Exam cost aside, preparing for this specialty can be rather expensive. There is a whole industry around mock practice tests, study books, video tutorials and hands-on labs. Here I’ll aim to outline how to maximise the benefit while minimising costs, focusing on free resources.
Whitepapers, user guides and service FAQs
AWS documentation is arguably the best source of study material out there. I don’t know a single person who passed the exam without reading through at least some of them. Check out the official exam guide for the overview of domains to select the relevant ones. I focused on IAM, KMS, CloudTail, CloudWatch, VPC, Lambda, Inspector, GuardDuty, Athena, Macie and AWS Microsoft AD. At a very minimum, you should read these:
I also wrote about my experience in using security-related AWS services in my blog.
Online courses
Who needs paid for online tutorials when the AWS YouTube channel has a lot of their re:Invent talks available for free? There is literally a video on pretty much every subject you are interested in. There are too many to mention and you could conduct a simple search to find the latest talk on what you want, but I’ll recommend a few to get you started:
If you would rather have a structured online course instead and don’t mind paying a little bit for it, I recommend the Linux Academy and/or A Cloud Guru. I’ve done them both. Personally, I preferred the former as it had some hands-on labs, but A Cloud Guru is shorter and has some good exam tips. Besides, you can try both of them for free for 7 days and decide for yourself.
There is also the official AWS Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Security – Specialty course. It covers the exam structure, gives you tips on tackling questions and provides thorough explanations. I would save this one for last to get a view of your preparedness.
Practice tests
The obvious thing to do is to buy the official practice exam from AWS, right? Well, maybe not. Unless you’ve got it for free for passing one of the other AWS exams previously, you might be better off finding an alternative. It only includes 20 questions (which works out at $2 per question plus tax), and you don’t get to see the answers! Instead, you are presented with a pass/fail summary that gives you the overall percentage broken down by exam domains. You might be better off using the free 15 questions from Whizlabs, although I can’t recommend their paid products. Practice tests are also included in the Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru courses I mentioned above. Plus, the free official Exam Readiness course also comes with 24 questions with answers and explanations at the end. That should be enough to give you the feel for types of question on the exam.
Getting ready
When revising, I found some good notes and a mindmap from other students on the internet. You can also go through a set of flashcards (e.g. on Quizlet) to recap on what you’ve learned.
With all this preparation, don’t lose track of why you are doing it in the first place: gaining the skills that you can apply in practice. The exam gives a good indication of your weaker areas and encourages you to fill these gaps. The best way to do this is, of course, through hands-on experience. If your organisation relies on AWS, find ways to apply the newly acquired knowledge there to make your cloud infrastructure more secure. If that’s not an option, there is always the Free Tier, where you can put your skills into practice. Finally, the Linux Academy (and some other providers) for a small cost offer you some hands-on labs and even a whole sandboxed playground for you to experiment in.
AWS constantly evolve and refine their services, and add new ones too. Keep this in mind while studying, as things move pretty fast in the cloud world. This also means that your learning is never finished, even if you pass the exam. But I think this is a good thing and I’m sure you agree!
In the past year I had the opportunity to help a tech startup shape its culture and make security a brand differentiator. As the Head of Information Security, I was responsible for driving the resilience, governance and compliance agenda, adjusting to the needs of a dynamic and growing business.
Cyber Security Leadership 