Auditors
Squinting at Security Drivers and Perspective-based Biases
While doing some thinking on threat modelling I started examining what the usual drivers of security spend and controls are in an organisation. I’ve spent some time on multiple fronts, security management (been audited, had CIOs push for priorities), security auditing (followed workpapers and audit plans), pentesting (broke in however we could) and security consulting (tried to help people fix stuff) and even dabbled with trying to sell some security hardware. This has given me some insight (or at least an opinion) into how people have tried to justify security budgets, changes, and findings or how I tried to. This is a write up of what I believe these to be (caveat: this is my opinion). This is certainly not universalisable, i.e. it’s possible to find unbiased highly experienced people, but they will still have to fight the tendencies their position puts on them. What I’d want you to take away from this is that we need to move away from using these drivers in isolation, and towards more holistic risk management techniques, of which I feel threat modelling is one (although this entry isn’t about threat modelling).
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