Everything you know about security is wrong, stop protecting your empire!

Last week I kept running into old school people trying to justify why something that made sense in the past still makes sense today. Usually I ignore these sort of statements, but I feel like I’m seeing them often enough it’s time to write something up. We’re in the middle of disruptive change. That means that the way security used to work doesn’t work anymore (some people think it does) and in the near future, it won’t work at all. In some instances will actually be harmful if it’s not already.

The real reason I’m writing this up is because there are really two types of leaders. Those who lead to inspire change, and those who build empires. For empire builders, change is their enemy, they don’t welcome the new disrupted future. Here’s a list of the four things I ran into this week that gave me heartburn.

• You need AV
• You have to give up usability for security
• Lock it all down then slowly open things up
• Firewall everything

Let’s start with AV. A long time ago everyone installed an antivirus application. It’s just what you did, sort of like taking your vitamins. Most people can’t say why, they just know if they didn't do this everyone would think they're weird. Here’s the question for you to think about though: How many times did your AV actually catch something? I bet the answer is very very low, like number of times you’ve seen bigfoot low. And how many times have you seen AV not stop malware? Probably more times than you’ve seen bigfoot. Today malware is big business, they likely outspend the AV companies on R&D. You probably have some control in that phone book sized policy guide that says you need AV. That control is quite literally wasting your time and money. It would be in your best interest to get it changed.

Usability vs security is one of my favorite topics these days. Security lost. It’s not that usability won, it’s that there was never really a battle. Many of us security types don’t realize that though. We believe that there is some eternal struggle between security and usability where we will make reasonable and sound tradeoffs between improving the security of a system and adding a text field here and an extra button there. What really happened was the designers asked to use the bathroom and snuck out through the window. We’re waiting for them to come back and discuss where to add in all our great ideas on security.

Another fan favorite is the best way to improve network security is to lock everything down then start to open it up slowly as devices try to get out. See the above conversation about usability. If you do this, people just work around you. They’ll use their own devices with network access, or just work from home. I’ve seen employees using the open wifi of the coffee shop downstairs. Don’t lock things down, solve problems that matter. If you think this is a neat idea, you’re probably the single biggest security threat your organization has today, so at least identifying the problem won’t take long.

And lastly let’s talk about the old trusty firewall. Firewalls are the friend who shows up to help you move, drinks all your beer instead of helping, then tells you they helped because now you have less stuff to move. I won’t say they have no value, they’re just not great security features anymore. Most network traffic is encrypted (or should be), and the users have their own phones and tablets connecting to who knows what network. Firewalls only work if you can trust your network, you can’t trust your network. Do keep them at the edge though. Zero trust networking doesn’t mean you should purposely build a hostile network.

We’ll leave it there for now. I would encourage you to leave a comment below or tell me how wrong I am on Twitter. I’d love to keep this conversation going. We’re in the middle of a lot of change. I won’t say I’m totally right, but I am trying really hard to understand where things are going, or need to go in some instances. If my silly ramblings above have put you into a murderous rage, you probably need to rethink some life choices, best to do that away from Twitter. I suspect this will be a future podcast topic at some point, these are indeed interesting times.

How wrong am I? Let me know: @joshbressers on Twitter.