Bad Penny » Management

What we do

Ian Gorrie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:13:59 +0000

It’s nice that geeks are cool now. Now there are a lot of people who say they’re hardcore. Here’s some of them:

These stereotypes are not who I’m going to be talking about, though I do have some guilty pleasures of a few of those portrayed above. I’m going to talk about me and my kind. The high end technology workers. People who were geeks before the big money and the sexy arrived to geekland.

The tech industry, and information security especially, is rarely understood by outsiders. I was reminded of this recently when I came to realize that none of my non-hardcore-geek friends, all of my family, and also many different-interested nerds didn’t get what I do.

I thought that a bit of my history and example would be helpful by way of explanation.

Titles I’ve had in the past has included:

System Administrator
Network Operations
Information Technology Manager
Various consulting titles in Systems Management, Information Security, Risk Management and others
Chief Information Officer
Board membership of various associations and businesses here and there
Speaker and presenter

So what do these things mean? Well I guess that’s the problem. In themselves, they all basically mean the same thing but the responsibilities are a bit different. Really what people like me do is something of a business to geekland ambassador/translator, technology manager, risk manager, and court wizard.

We are the experts that you need to make sure the company, people, or organization is correctly driving technology. Without involving someone like us from time to time (at a minimum), you risk running your ship aground on rocks that you didn’t know were there.

People like us can do things like telling organizations:

Where they’re spending too much
Where they’re not spending enough
What risks they haven’t identified that threaten damage to their business or brand
How to manage what they have better and cheaper
How to break huge systematic/complicated problems into workable chunks

I’ve spent years doing the unlikely for employers who often thought what I was doing was impossible and many of the rest didn’t understand what I was up to at all. I’ve made jokes about operationalizing the black magic that holds the internet together, herding cats, and the usual fairly weak geek cliches for our industry.

EDS didn’t come up with the expression, but they did co-opt it. The cat reference speaks to the mindset it takes to succeed in the bowels of this beast.

So what is this job really? It’s a layer cake.

It is a stack of skills and concepts that build and commingle with each other. A deep understanding of how a large variety of technologies work and interact.

The complexity involved is what makes doing this job well difficult. There are usually hundreds (or many thousands) of ways to solve the problems that we work with, but usually only a few that are the best. The best being the greatest bang-for-buck, cost savings in efficiency and productivity, risk reduction, or a combination of these.

This is not something you can read a book about, go to a community college to be prepared for, or complete a training course in and expect to be equipped to handle. It is compounded mastery of difficult and frequently changing subject matter.

Qualities that everyone who is good in this field have includes:

That they never stop learning
They want to know how things work
They crave solving problems
They enjoy a challenge

It isn’t for everyone.

The Trials of Toorcamp

Ian Gorrie — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:40:54 +0000

Toorcamp was many things this year.

It was fun.

It was uncomfortable.

Dustdevils ate things occasionally.

It was turbulent due to the trouble with Levitate to get hackers to help promote their event for free or they wouldn’t fulfill their agreement to let us use the missile facility for talks and workshops.

There was some excellent music.

There were fine people in attendance as it took some dedication and preparation to get out there and stay there.

Enough said about that. I was expecting more problems. More can be found at the Toorcamp wiki.

My presentation at this Toorcon Seattle area hacker retreat was concerned itself with three main points.

How to get a job in todays market
Identifying the common players and bad actors in todays organizations
How I recommend dealing with them

I entitled my talk Hacking HR in the traditional usage of the word hack. I’ve seen a lot of usage that uses “hack” as a synonym for small tips on how to accomplish obvious tasks. This isn’t how I use the word.

Anyway, let’s get started.

There are some really large problems with our industry at the moment, and they’re not improving. Things are getting worse. They’re getting more complex. There are people who don’t understand their complex systems taking bad advice from people who have profit motives that are not aligned to their customers best interest.

This is a prescription for bad times and, in general, they are upon us.

Bad times are not without opportunity and there is no time like the present to get started.

This is a talk in three acts (without trying to be overly pompous, just for pacing really)

How to get the gig you want against all odds
Identify the common players and bad actors in organizations and my suggestions on how to deal with them
How to effectively change the playing field. Fight bad actors with metrics and data. Change behavior by re-aligning profit motives.

The current state of the industry is in pretty bad shape.

Compliance drives and funds most IT and security efforts which results in ineffective and cart before the horse risk management and security governance programs.
More contractors are empowered and employed instead of FTEs
Hiring managers less relevant in todays hiring and management process.

These are huge problems.

Get powerfully clued individuals out of contracting/consulting/specialty and into positions where they can make an effective difference.

Empower insiders to make effective change and turn around industry trends of ineffective speciality, ineffective governance, and ineffective outsourcing. No consultant can be as effective as an insider who is deeply familiar with the environment, business units, and corporate culture.

The proper mindset. Levity included. There should always be an element of fun in these talks.

A quick blurb about me.

Companies that recognize the rewards of a good risk management program, like insurance and sometimes financial organizations, trend better. Usually for everyone else, important matters need to be presented in terms of business risk or opportunity that everyone can understand. Engaging in this discussion is one of the most important and rarely effectively performed tasks for those in our line.

I consider the things that I describe in my talk to be common and pervasive in moderate to large sized businesses in the United States and in places that follow American business’s lead.

My conclusions are based on my career of consulting and long conversations along this line with many of my trusted peers. I’m confident that you’ll see things my way. If you do not and disagree with me, I want to hear from you.

Act I: Breaking the ice and getting hired.

The current state needs to be understood. If you’ve ever wondered why some people who are not only not good at their role, but really obviously bad at it reached their position, this might help.

How are these bad actors allowed to get into organizations and reap huge rewards from not working towards their employers best interests? It’s because and in large respect, doing the right thing is not what gets rewarded.

The real problem: It is now commonplace that few understand how to effectively manage or hire anymore. The ninjas have been promoted up and away or running their own businesses and the losers have been fired or promoted just enough to make sure everyone else fails. Conflicts of interest are rampant with vendors and are in opposition to their clients running healthy risk management programs.

No one in senior management roles seem to have any clue about technology and treat it as a luxury instead of the bedrock on which modern business is performed.

The right people aren’t rewarded, the right skill sets are not valued and cultivated, and organizations cant attract or retain the right people and skill/experience sets they need to run an effective information security program.

Disclosing these methods and interests to the internet in general will, I hope, change the way business is done over time.

The first step is getting in the door, so how do you get an edge on that position that you want?

Look them up on social networks. Stalk them and cordially meet them at user groups and professional organizations if you’re really motivated.

Use LinkedIn to get insider contacts and internal intel for the players and the organization you’re trying to enter.

Use search engines and social network mining for greater impact. Don’t be shy.

wink.com – Searches on people over social networking sites.

pipl.com – Basically a people-optimized search engine. It’ll help narrow down likely results of interest.

Image credit

Dress right. Not overdressed. Not underdressed. Example: geeks in suits freak out hiring managers whos “dress up” is cleanest-t-shirt and jeans with least holes.

Be a right-fit. Remove overly qualified statements, degrees, or certifications from your resume. Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should volunteer information that might make you sound bragging or overqualitied. Understated is a good tactic. Be surprising.

Get contact information for those you interview. Consider thanking them for their time and for meeting them. This isn’t always a good idea, but is a class move if the audience is receptive.

Try not to give up any dealkillers. Don’t be late. No one cares if there was a traffic accident on the highway. Don’t have dirty fingernails. Hiring managers have odd dealbreakers sometimes. Try to avoid the common ones.

Staffing is about liking you. Jerks can get gigs occasionally, but only if there isn’t a guy who isn’t almost as good that people would like to work with more.

If you’re going to be an ass in business, you had better have all the answers all of the time to make up for it. It’s usually a better idea not to be a jerk. It’ll make you a stand out; a nail to be hammered.

Be known in the community offline and on. Give back. Write things. Contribute. All of these things help.

It would be better to do useful things, but I’ll bet you can think of some examples of people who have become big deals just for talking to people and being knowledgeable.

Ever submit your resume for a position you were qualified for but never heard back from anyone? It might be because someone is screening applications and looking for keyword matches. It happens all the time. It’s a lousy fit for technology positions, but no one told the human resources industry.

But don’t overdo it. Tailor it to the opening writeup.

If you don’t know someone specific, don’t use a cover letter.

Have a well formatted and presented resume. A bad resume is almost always a dealkiller.

Follow up. Be enthusiastic.

So what’s the problem here? Why doesn’t merit rise to the top and why don’t poor performers get culled from the herd?

The simple reason is that when people get together, things get complicated.

The recent compliance efforts have not got the job done. Worse, most people and many in the industry, don’t know the difference between effective governance (to use an overused and frequently misused term) and just making the minimum effort which is compliance.

A lot of things were funded because of the big scary compliance boogyman, but in general it has only created a huge mess of policy, standards, procedures, outsourcing, controls, contracts, vendors, complicated staffing and dependent org charts, and more.

Sounds complicated? It is.

..and guess who that is going to be.

It’s the attendees of this talk and those like us that are going to be tasked with the big cleanup after conventional wisdom comes back around to reality that convenient and magic bullet solutions aren’t working. It is not going to be pretty.

It’s going to take a lot of work. Things are going to change. Empires are going to fall. Castles built of shifting sand are going to fall into the sea. The current common model is not sustainable and isn’t doing anything for shareholder value. Eventually that will be what brings things around.

The first step is becoming an insider.

Deliverables from important consulting engagements can be left unread. Without commitment from executives or a board, a risk management or infosec program is toothless and can be ignored.

Insiders have a level of familiarity with business practices and behaviors that consultants and contracting outsiders do not by their nature of short-timers. This needs to be valued and leveraged more than it is currently.

Risk to technology systems often isn’t considered a business risk, but a cost center. The benefits are usually overlooked and not capitalized upon.

The root cause here is corporate culture.

There’s a million references out there about why being an agile organization is a good idea. I can only guess at why executive leadership doesn’t make it a bigger priority. The model seems to be worth talking about, but it seems to be rare indeed that anyone wants to take on a difficult job pre-catastrophe.

Two generalized corporate culture examples:

American: ready shoot aim aim aim
Japanese: ready aim aim aim aim shoot

Selecting a solution to poorly or undefined problems and fixing deployments of poor-fit solutions can be very hard. If they can’t be fixed, they will be very expensive to operationally support.

Metrics bring an appreciation of quality and total cost. Both are lacking. What is needed, and what are usually unavailable, are more apples to apples comparison of risk and reward. Cherry picking of statistics for TCO and ROI calculations is rampant.

The RFP process: The low bid is often sizably more expensive than others when total ownership and operational cost is considered. Efficiency and elegance has hidden rewards.

Risk management and even assessments are not quantitative product. They are qualitative art.

Specialists, in my experience, tend to have linear and routine thinking in bringing the same approach to every problem. This can yield incomplete answers and piecemeal solutions to complicated problems. Piecemeal means complication, fault intolerance, and expensive operational cost.

Separation or segregation of duties is a good idea and is appropriate often, but that doesn’t mean that there should be a limited awareness of processes and overall architecture.

Reasonable people are often scared off from the technology industry. There are a lot of reasons for this and that could be an entirely different talk.

These people are not a signifigant part of the problem as they can be reasoned with effectively. They’re out there and I hope you can find them.

There are often many solid contributers in successful organizations.

Many of the people I’m about to mention can be effective. I’m going to center on what they’re like when they’re a problem and my take on how to interact with them.

Put things in terms relevant to their interests.

Look out for their ego measuring contests. Outshining them is a sure way to land in their disfavor.

These guys are pretty much irrelevant but common. They are best avoided.

They’re going through a checklist. Give them things to check off and move on to the hiring manager(s).

They want you to sound confident. Very likely to have no idea what you do, why it is important, or how it gets done. They’re looking for you to speak well and sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Sadly too common with downsized efforts, eroded budgets, and no resources to which they can delegate.

They’re looking for someone who can work in a vacuum. Sufficiency is what you need here.

If you’re fortunate enough to interview with a ninja, make the most of it.

BS the ninja at your peril.

Come clean. Tell them what you know and what you do not.

Tell stories from the trenches.

So if we can’t count on insiders to get everything done because the old clue has been promoted or driven out, who’s left?

The previous slides are all mostly hard workers in their own way. The following are not.

Every consultant has worked with this joker.

They can create big problems and large messes of rushed or under-delivered projects that actually have to work.

After signoff, under-baked solutions can be a real operational nightmare. The more complicated and ambitious, the worse the aftermath can be if anything other than ideal.

Can be even less interested in the outcome than all promises sales guy. Relentless in their “buy our stuff. we’re the best” mantra.

When HR doesn’t want to do their job and hiring managers are too busy or not allowed to be involved, the staffing firms soak up a lot of profit by just posting requirements and funneling in bozos.

Getting into a relationship with HR means they can sit at home and capture a significant portion of contractor work effort compensation while adding little (if any) value.

If that wasn’t enough, they also have a profit motive to place as many people as possible, not in placing quality people. Individual headhunters can achieve in extra ordinary ways, but staffing firms almost never deliver in this way.

These people are key actors in the not-my-job industry of lazy.

More times than not, their goals are misaligned to the organization that is employing them. Very rarely is a consultancy interested in solving problems. There’s no profit motive. They’re interested in an increase in revenue and scope of engagements.

The larger the size of the consultancy, the more likely these practices are to arise.

The real magic of the magic quadrant is the ability to get people to pay for the analysis.

Scoped to the average environment in the average business in the average industry.

There is no industry average environment. The best fit for an environment may not be on the leading edge of their wave or quadrant at all.

Yes. You really do have to do your homework.

The classical argument of heterogeneous and homogeneous networks and solutions is usually academic, however interoperability and performance is often misstated or exaggerated.

This individual is the complement to the Industry Analyst. Neither is a replacement for skilled investigation and logical comparison of options.

What is more expensive? A failed implementation following a hasty decision, or a reasoned approach?

My take on how to dig our way out.. but first!

Compliance is a minimum standard, not a gold standard. It is a checklist.

It is not a risk management program or effective governance.

An auditor background and skill set and that of an information security practitioner very rarely intermix.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. This is the way. Always be improving.

Dead Mike knows what was up.

Source. CB4 Video.

Edward Tufte also knew what was up. I’m told that his works are amazing.

Metrics are most effective when cheap to collect and immediately meaningful to the reviewer.

This is a difficult but highly rewarding standard to achieve.

These were some metric suggestions in order to inspire discussion and interaction during my talk.

Some people were pretty heated.

Some didn’t believe that scoring candidates was feasible. It was my contention that academic boards had found effective ways to do just that with their incoming student applicants and surely simple quantitative metric data can be gathered.

One attendee mentioned counting spelling mistakes in a resume.

Another suggested that any metric collection can be gamed nearly immediately. I suggested not disclosing the metric criteria.

If you have your ducks in a row, it will call attention to those that do not. If this does not happen, call attention to it.

Tell the world! Share your data!

When you can rely on data, you can make effective decisions in the light of day based on something more than arbitrary judgement and gut feelings.

When this is pervasive, FUD will be a thing of the past.

Consultants at large failing business are delaying the inevitable unless culture change takes place. The axe man will appear one way or another.

Metrics are factual. They are not slander.

“Oh! Someone might sue you!” That’s what corporate retained counsel is there for. Sharing data in a pay it forward fashion will make the business community and our industry a much better place nearly overnight.

This is important. This needs to happen.

If you enjoyed this talk, you may wish to look at one of my previous talks about security and compliance metrics (a long talk) or the added risks of compliance (a short talk).

Hopefully my sense of humor comes through in this publication method. I attempt to present on issues that I have not heard aired previously in a light-hearted and whimsical way, and only when I feel I can contribute something to the conversation.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear from you.

Big Tech Wins: Calendars

Ian Gorrie — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:14:13 +0000

So that covers how I have made my contacts sane and available. What about calendars?

I have a bit of a complicated life, so I have a few different types of calendars:

Home, social, and personal stuff
My day job
Assorted other professional and industry engagements

The best way to get things all extra organized and available so that you can access your changing life on the go is to get it synced across your devices and available online.

It would also nice to be able to subscribe to associates, socialites, and arch enemies calendars. All of this can be done with Google Calendar and, to my knowledge, no one else easily. I’m going to focus on easy here as publishing a public ical via WebDAV or other calendaring application is more trouble than it is worth when Google will do it for you.

Since I have this complicated life, I’m going to have to make another flowchart to so my daring love triangle of directional sync with OSX, Windows, Google, ipods, and Symbian. I make it sound complicated, but the use of it all is quite simple because the changes flow into each other so that everything magically stays in sync. If you make too many changes too quickly in too many places, you could wind up with sync issues which are never fun to resolve. So please. Figure out where you work effectively and keep it as simple as possible. Hopefully you’ll never know what people are talking about when they complain about their sync issues.

Google bidirectional sync for iCal and Mozilla products can be found here.

Note how having your act together with your address book at this point helps out your use of calendaring? You might want to do that first if you haven’t already.

The Calaboration app (gotta love bad puns) is pure simplicity to use to configure ical to have read/write access to your online calendar with in your Google account.

Click OK and it will be done. Optionally when your initial sync is complete, open up your ical preferences and into account settings to set how often you want it to sync; manually, or every 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

The Google Calendar bidirectional connecter for Outlook is called Google Calendar Sync (how about that) and can be found here and looks like this:

In the end, it looks like this.

Each location will be able to make changes to the calendar and have them be propagated to the others at the interval that they are configured to sync. Additionally, any web browser can be used to log into Google Calendar and make or delete entries if using these are inconvenient for some reason.

I use a few other tricks for private entries, birthdays, and the like to keep myself organized, but I thought that the low-hanging fruit example would be valuable.

Please let me know if this makes your life a bit easier.

Amazon downtime

Ian Gorrie — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:11:39 +0000

There was recent news about how Amazon was down for two hours. Speculation runs rampant on cnet about the cause:

“It doesn’t seem to be the result of a network-initiated attack, at least from my preliminary analysis from our probes,” Ranjan said.

Human error may not sound as gripping a tale as a network attack, but there’s plenty of drama for the people responsible. And it’s the career-limiting variety of drama, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, who hazarded a guess that Amazon’s problem involved its front-end Web servers.

The security group of WebSense, a Web site and communications protection company, also saw no evidence Amazon’s problem was security related.

Having talked to a lot of Amazon people here after my arrival in Seattle, I’m surprised that they don’t have more downtime. Amazon is run like a huge basement operation.

Let me explain.

Amazon doesn’t have a real operational staff. They have developers that code up releases by day and then have to handle first-line response to outages and incidents by night.

As far as I can tell, they have no industry standard monitoring software, configuration management platform, or even any centralized policy framework. They leave everything up to business units to develop all of their own infrastructure and systems management strategy. Best yet, it’s all run by developers.

I think everyone reading this who has been a pro in running operational systems just recoiled in horror after that last sentence.

I understand that entrepreneurial environments want to be as nonconforming and iconoclastic as possible as to “think outside the box” or whatever in-your-face-status-quo stance to encourage innovation, but don’t take that kool-aid to the harsh realm of uptime.

Stability in operational systems by standardizing their build process, quality assurance of code deployments, and operational staffing that doesn’t tax your architectural staff not only leads to better performance, but it also takes your staff out from under the Sword of Damocles of downtime. Having to choose between stability and innovation is a poor choice to make when you can have both, and a cost savings, with a bit of operational sanity.

Symantec and commercial spyware

Ian Gorrie — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:39:50 +0000

I have no sympathy for the consumers of Solid Oak as discussed, if that is the right word, in the well circulated Chloe Albanesius article dramatically entitled “Update: Symantec Screwup Is ‘Worse Than Any Virus.‘”

Yes. Let’s be as sensational as possible far beyond the point of legitimacy. Good plan, Chloe. I’m sure your frothing editors at whatever brand of Ziff Davis are very happy.

If you have read this article and don’t understand what I mean when I say that the customers have it wrong to deploy spyware to police their systems, please allow me to explain. If you are deploying the cliche-named cybersitter or snoopstick, of course they should be detected and disabled by default. They are spyware and have the same behaviors as other spyware.

Institutions intending to control the content of web, and other internet traffic, need to have a captive portal approach with content management or they will fail. Treating the workstation as a trusted resource, in nearly all cases, is a mistake. Unless a lot of time and effort is spent in its deployment using technology that has been developed for this purpose, it is always going to be a piecemeal and fault-prone solution.

To get a handle on network traffic, you must take steps to secure your network and not focus on the weakest link that is the workstation. Instead, institutional consumers would be best served by looking into proxies that provide content management to control website destinations, malware scanning, and allowed application traffic.

malware, proxy, symantec, zdnet

Security Information Management [SIM]