Synopsis

Greetings fans, this episode promises to be a great one with the likes of Adam Shostack starting off talking about what the whole concept of "New School Security" is all about, and how it differs from the way we've all done it for the past 15+ years.  Adam and I talked through some new interesting ideas for moving the information security community and discipline forward, and even commented on how we can start to overcome the security community's focus on 'secrecy' when things go wrong.  How do security professionals understand what the desired outcomes should be, then start to move towards implemting pragmatic approaches to move closer to those desired outcomes - because in the end it's really about business and getting it done, not about 'security'.

You will be sorry if you miss this episode!

Guest

• Adam Shostack - Adam Shostack is a principal program manager on the Usable Security team in Trustworthy Computing. As part of ongoing research into classifying and quantifying how Windows machines get compromised, he recently led the drive to change Autorun functionality on pre-Win7 machines; the update has so far improved the protection of nearly 400 million machines from attack via USB. Prior to Usable Security, he drove the SDL Threat Modeling Tool and the Elevation of Privilege threat modeling game as a member of the SDL core team. Before joining Microsoft, Adam was a leader of successful information security and privacy startups, and helped found the CVE, the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium and the International Financial Cryptography Association. He is co-author of the widely acclaimed book, The New School of Information Security.

Links

• Adam on Twitter: @AdamShostack
• The New School Security blog: http://newschoolsecurity.com/

Synopsis

Last winter, on a frigid afternoon I got a chance to sit down with 2 of my favorite Iowa locals, Kevin and Kenneth to talk about the tenuous relationship between QA and Information Security.  Earlier in the day I had given a workshop on software security testing (of the web variety) to a ViViT user group, and with that topic and their questions/concerns fresh in my mind I settled down for a 30 minute conversation with Kevin and Kenneth ... we essentially continued the conversation from Episode 3 (please give that a listen if you haven't yet to get a background).

Some of the questions we tackled included "Which team within the software development or security organization is best positioned to test the security of applications?", and "Can Information Security ever really thoroughly test an application without the full context?" ...and much more.

Give this episode a listen!

Guests

• Kevin Riggins - @kriggins - Kevin is a veteran of the Information Security community with many years experience in vast IT systems and a quality, development and systems background as well.
• Kenneth Johnson - @patories - Kenneth has been in the Information Security field for the last six years, with five of those years working as an IT Analyst for Principal Financial Group. He graduated in 2007 with a BS degree in Information Systems Security from ITT Tech, and he is currently attending Iowa State to pursue a Ph.D in Information Assurance, with a specialization in Digital Forensics, Incident Response and Malware Analysis.

Greetings friends!  I am taking some time to do something a little out of the ordinary right now... I'm coming to you from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada and HP Discover 2012 where the theme is Make it matter.

Rather than doing yet another blog post on how beautiful the show floor is, and how amazing the content is going to be, I've recorded a little bit of audio, about 6:30 miutes or so to give you a feel for what we're up to, what's going on, and why I'm downright giddy with excitement.