Brakeing Down Security Podcast Blog: 2019-011-part 2 of our interview with Brian "Noid" Harden

Bryan Brake 0:13
Hello everybody this is Bryan from Brakeing Down Security this week you're gonna hear part two of our interview with Noid, we did a lot of interesting discussions with him and it went so well that we needed the second week so for those of you here just catching this now Part One was last week so you can just go back and download that one. We're going to start leading in with the "one of us" story because one of the one of the slides he talked about was how you know he you know learned how to be one with his dev team and one of the last topics we had was kind of personal to me I do a lot of pentest writing for reports and stuff at my organization "Leviathan" and and you know, we talked about you know What makes a good report how to write reports for all kinds of people, whether it be a manager that you're giving it to, from an engagement for a customer, or, you know, the technical people who might be fixing the bugs that an engagement person might find, or a pen tester might find in this case. So, yeah, we're we're going to go ahead and lead in with that. Before we go though, SpectreOps is looking for people to go to their classes. They're learning adversary tactics and red team Operations Training course in Tysons Corner, Virginia. It's currently $4,000 to us and it's from April 23, April 26 of this year 2019. That doesn't include also airfare and hotel, so you're gonna have to find your way to Tysons Corner the Hyatt Regency there's a link in the show notes of course to the to the class if you'd like to go You'll learn things like designing and deploying sophisticated resilient covert attack infrastructure, gaining initial access footholds on systems using client side attacks, and real world scenarios cutting edge lateral movement methods to move through the enterprise and a bunch of other cool things... so yeah if you're interested in and hooking that up you can you there's still you still got more than a month to sign up for it it looks like there might still be tickets so knock yourselves out they're also looking for blue team people. "Mike P" on our Slack channel, which will tell you about the end of the show here on how to join if you'd like, he said http://www.workshopcon.com/events they're looking for blue team trainers... you can hang out with folks like you know, SpecterOps and Tim Tomes (LanMaster53) as well there when you you know we can you sign up for the blue team stuff and yeah http://www.workshopcon.com/events and then you can you know learn to be a blue team trainer or actually give blue team training if you so choose. So that said it's pretty awesome. Alright, so without further ado, we're going to get started with part two of our interview with Noid here, hope you have a great week. And here we go.

Okay. So I think we've gotten down to like the "one of us" story. So we're in our hero finally starts to get it and begins to bridge the gap. Some of the things some of the points are the lessons learned in this story. And you can tell us about story was that language makes all the difference in the world. This is what got me on to the part about the reporting, which we'll talk about a little while, but maybe you could fill us in on this discovery, this the story that got you to these points.

Brian "Noid" Harden 3:37
Okay, so the team I'm working on I get asked the the thing in question is it was a pretty massive product and it had never had any threat modeling done,

Bryan Brake 3:50
okay.

Brian "Noid" Harden 3:51
So had never had any threat modeling done and this this particular product was made up of tons of little sub products. So what I did is I sat there first in a kind of a complete panic going, this is overwhelming. I don't have nearly enough time or resources to be able to do this. But you know how to eat the elephant, right? The small pieces and get at it. So I had one dev lead, who I know, had worked previously on a security product. And he was a nice guy. So I sat down with them and basically said, "Hey, could you walk me through visually diagramming how your service works, building that data flow diagram, and then we're going to talk about it from a security perspective". And he was sort of like, oh, that'd be fun. Yeah, let's do that. And so we sat there and he diagrammed and the whole time he's diagramming, he'd stop and erase things and go, Wait, no, no, we were going to do it that way. But we didn't. And then oh, and we stopped doing it this way, because we added this other thing and we had to be able to break communication out number channels and then he stopped at one point and was like, get a picture of this was like I think this is probably the most accurate diagram of our service we've ever had. And then when we started doing the threat modeling side of it, like, you know, talking about trust boundaries and you know, it's like all right, so what makes sure that you know data from point A to point B and it's not filled with that kind of thing? And I'm saying okay well, could you could you you know, do this over HTTPS rather than just regular HTTP

Bryan Brake 5:29
right

Brian "Noid" Harden 5:31
you know you get non repudiation you know, and it's like, not talking about even the security value of it, but talking more about the you know, you the integrity be there and then at one point, he stops and he looks at me and he says, Man, I never had a threat modeling would generate so much feature work. And in my mind, I was like, talking about feature work like, these are bugs you need to fix. Now, all of a sudden, it was like, Oh, crap, I've been approaching this entirely the wrong way my entire career. Devs look at things that have looked at depth look at things from bug fixing, and feature development. And as a security person, what i, every time I'd been bringing up stuff they needed to do in my mind, it was implied it was feature development. But they saw this bug fixing, because in the "dev world" security fixes or bug fixes. He saw the value here and went, Oh, this is going to generate a ton of feature work. And it's like, oh, so I gotta stop calling the security work. I've got to start calling this feature work. And sure enough, not only if you start calling it feature work. And of course now once you're talking about feature work, you can start talking about the drivers. Why are we building a feature because you know, you don't build features nobody wants. Unless you're certain software companies. But yeah, but you build.. you build features that come out of customer requests, you know, you get features that hey, you know, I look at things like say Microsoft Office, how that's evolved over the years. And that's because people who use Office come back and say, you know, this is really cool. But I'd really like it if when I'm giving my PowerPoint presentation, I had a timer on the screen. So I know I'm on mark, you know, and Okay, that's a feature requests. And so that's how these things evolve. And so once I started talking about security work from the perspective of feature development you know, we have existing features that need to be worked on to give them new functionality in order to be able to pick up new customers and we have new features that we need to build that will also help because the other thing too I also noticed is that well... well I care about things like confidentiality and integrity. Devs care about things like availability and performance, right, these two these two things can kind of be almost used interchangeably, depending on the circumstance, so when, when devs are talking about stability, I'm thinking about integrity. When I'm when I'm talking about availability, they're, they're thinking about performance. And so all of a sudden, I'm now giving them ideas for like new proof counters, basically, like new metrics to check the health of the thing that we're building. And the way I looked at it was almost... Yeah, this is what this is the business driver for the, you know, customer X wants it customer Y needs it, you know, and here's the benefit, you know, the product gets out of it. Here's the benefit that developers get out of it. And what a security get out of it? Hey, don't worry about it. Purely, purely any value I derived from this work is purely coincidental.

Brian Boettcher 8:57
*Chuckles*

Brian "Noid" Harden 9:00
And that, in turn, helps start driving the conversation a lot better. Because the other value I got out of it, too is by having somebody on the development side of the house who had a name and had some, you know, reputation behind him, he was able to go to his respective peers and say, Man, I did this thing with Noid and it was really valuable. And we got a lot of cool stuff out of it. So he's gonna hit you up about it. And I totally recommend doing

Bryan Brake 9:27
right

Brian "Noid" Harden 9:28
and at which point because because some of the folks I worked with were either indifferent towards me, they were just busy. I did have some folks that I work with, though, that were just flat out adversarial towards me. They frankly they didn't want me doing what I was doing. They didn't really want me parking and poking around like the dark corners of the product. You know, because it was going to make work, but having somebody on their side say, No, I actually got value out of this. Okay, well, I'll give it a try. Holy crap, I got value out of this, too. So that was that was where I suddenly realized that my languagein my mind, I'm not saying anything differently. But yet, it turns out that when it comes to the words coming out of my mouth and how they were being received, it radically changed how I was expressing myself to people. And it totally changed the response I got.

Brian Boettcher 10:26
So maybe we need a new "CIA" triad that has the other words on it, you know, the, the translated words for development and product teams,

Brian "Noid" Harden 10:35
possibly!

Bryan Brake 10:36
performance... integrity is stability.

Brian "Noid" Harden 10:43
Yeah, stability. availability...

Bryan Brake 10:48
What's confidentiality then? what does the other bit that they talk about or worry about?

Brian "Noid" Harden 10:52
I don't know if only we had a dev lead on this call.

Brian Boettcher 10:55
*chuckles*

Bryan Brake 10:56
Yeah. Do you know one? *laughs*. So, so the lessons learned, you said, language makes all the difference. You know the way you speak is like, you know, if you're, if you only know English, like most Americans and go over to France, speaking louder in English to somebody who only speaks French is not going to help here to help you so "look for the helpers" So let's say you don't, let's say we're not lucky enough to have somebody like the person you found in your organization is is it it's going to take a little bit longer maybe to get them onto your side to you know, poke at him like that or, you know, maybe grease the wheels with some donuts or you know, maybe take them to lunch or something. Would that be helpful at all?

Brian "Noid" Harden 11:35
Well, first off Yes, you'd be amazed at how much showing up with donuts

Bryan Brake 11:48
Oh, I know

Brian "Noid" Harden 11:49
Oh yeah. No, actually actually it's funny too because I actually just a couple of weeks ago and other team at my company came over and gave my team donuts

They gave my team the IT team and the tech team donuts because of all the work we've been putting in form... as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I'll march directly into hell for those people right now, because they gave me donuts...

Bryan Brake 11:56
niiiice.

they better be Top Pot donuts or something legit not like...

Brian "Noid" Harden 12:13
Oh, yeah, they were. They were Top Pot donuts. But yeah, so part of its that something else, too is doing some of the work yourself. So, in addition to all this work I'm doing I'm also managing the development of security features. And I had gone over the product spec for one of these security features. And I built a data flow diagram. And then during one of my little weekly Scrum meetings where I sit down with my devs. I showed it to them. and I remember one of them to and he immediately stopped and was like, "What is this?" He's like, "what is this doesn't make sense",

Bryan Brake 12:53
This is forbidden knowledge This is your thing.

Brian "Noid" Harden 12:56
Yeah, you wrote this. Okay, you wrote this, this is just a visual representation of the thing that you wrote. And once I explained it him, sort of the steps one through eleventy, you know, and showed him what had happened. He was sort of like a "Oh, that's interesting". Still somewhat dismissive of it, but it was still kind of a file. So in addition to, you know, buttering people up with donuts, and lunch and things like that, but also sometimes you gotta just buckle down and do it yourself, and then show the value. And I mean, I'll be blunt. That's how I've gone by through most of my career is when I can't get traction. I'll go do it. And then pop up and go. Hey, guys, check this thing out. Oh, wow. That's really neat. How do you do that? Where did you do that? It's like oh, you can do it too. Right now I can show you how I can work with you on it. I'm certainly not going to tell you to RTFM and walk out of the room. So part of it is it also shows a little bit of commitment on your part, sort of one of the things I've picked up that security, not even in the equation here. But just having worked in a lot of software development organizations with the devs and the PMs is the devs is frequently see the PM is not doing anything of value except for when you are. So when you are willing to put that kind of effort into deliver something like that, like, Hey, I thought modeled our service,it sort of shows this, "oh, I take it back. All those things I said about you know, you're not worthless after all." So there's definitely some value there too, because a lot of times too people are willing to say because it's easy to stand back and issue edicts, it's easy to stand back and just, you know, get up on your soapbox and tell everybody else what to do. But when you're when you show you're willing to eat your own dog food. That really gets people's attention because it's like, "Okay, this dude clearly cares about this a lot" And now that he's done it, I see what he's talking about. Yeah. You know, like we should do that there's value here.

Bryan Brake 15:11
So very cool. Yeah. So when you on the last slide here, when you wrapped it all up, you said engage early and often... Does it have to be so when we're talking about communication, open communication, trying to, you know, some of its, you know, cultivating relationships. So, you kind of need to, you know, if you're introverted, you kind of need to step out of your shell a little bit and go and talk to people, get out of your cubes for once a while. Turn on the lights, that kind of thing. How often did you talk with these teams to help build this relationship after a while, because obviously there had to be some team building there?

Brian "Noid" Harden 15:48
Yeah, so in my case, since I was in the team, we thought weekly, okay, weekly, and sometimes daily because they were literally down the hall from me, right, but in terms of where I've had to work in other organizations Where I've been in back in a centralized organization and having to work with remote teams or work with teams that I'm telling them to do things but I'm not in their org... like a weekly basis okay like we're going to meet up this weekbecause like for example like when I was a back when I was at Microsoft I worked in the MSRC before I left yeah and I was handling me and another guy we're handling all the (Internet Explorer)IE cases. Okay. That was a lot of cases because there's a lot of versions i right. So we would go meet with those cats once a week. And we would sit down with them and say, Okay, here's here's the queue. Here's what's new from last time. You know, here's sort of what we think is the priority for fixing things you know, what do you think about it, but it's it's that you always want them to know who you are, and you want them to know that you're just as busy as they are, and that you end that you're also respectful of their time, right? You know, so we'd make the meeting short... personal pet peeve of mine are people that set meetings deliberately long with the expectation of all just go ahead and give everybody 30 minutes. I'll give everybody 30 minutes back, right? Like, well thanks jerk. Like how about you could have just made a 30 minute meeting in the first place? You know it just tells that that that tells me you're not that doesn't tell me you're a magnanimous person that tells me you can't manage your time, you know. So I try to be really concise. Like, I'm going to set up a meeting with these devs. I'm going to include them agenda in the meeting invite. I'm going to set it for exactly how long I think it's like we're going to 30 minute meeting, you know, 30 minute meeting to go over the bugs that are in the queue. There's four new ones from last week one of them's really nasty, you know, that probably is probably going to be a non negotiable.. You know, but the other three are up for negotiation and you show up you sit down with them you know some pleasantries and then you just, you get to work and then you get them back out doing their thing and you get back to your thing. And that really flows well... It really flows well because, you know, none of us like meetings. And the closer you are to touching computers, the more meetings disrupt your flow the more they just disrupt your life and the thing that you're effectively getting usually paid a lot of money for.And so by kind of doing it that way, you keep that cadence up to keep that that sort of friendship and that that rapport up but the other thing too is a another point I wanted to make, but I'm getting tired... but yeah, but but along those lines to Yeah, yo get that rapport there. You're respectful of their time and then you... I can't remember what I was going to say next.

Bryan Brake 19:20
So the last bit was, let's see, don't talk about securities, talk about feature development. We talked about that threat modeling your developers, you and Dr. Cowan, my, my car pool buddy, you and Crispin need to you know get get together and talk about the the threat modeling he's doing... he doesn't do trust boundaries so much, one of the talk he gave at SeaSec East was about how we do threat modeling in our organization but a lot of companies are starting to see value in that before we do engagements because we can prioritize what's the more important thing to test versus just testing all the things in the environment

Brian "Noid" Harden 19:42
Threat modeling and software development is huge too, like that was one of the one of the things I think a lot of my developers I've done this with over the years have taken away from it is one you have to make it fun... You can't make a complete slog. But one of the nice things about threat modeling, is when you're visually looking at the thing you're going to build, that's when you make the realization that like, Oh, hey, my post office has no door... You know, and it's like the best time to figure that out. Then you always like, I always tell people that. Yeah, the best time to fix a bug is an alpha before you write anything... And the next best time to fix it is before it goes into production. And the worst possible time to fix a bug is after I've been in prod for 10 years, and it's a it's a load bearing bug at this point. It has dependencies on it

Bryan Brake 20:30
you know what, it's funny you mentioned that I've been seeing some like Linux kernel bugs they said there was one in there for like 15 years old at affected all of like 2.6.x to up to the latest version. It was a use after free bug, you know that I don't know if they found the bug 15 years ago and just never fixed it but yeah, bugs like that sit in there because people don't don't check for that kind of stuff...

Brian "Noid" Harden 20:51
that happens sometimes those the well I mean, God remember that. Remember the whole SYN flood thing in the 90s? Yeah, I mean it was it was it was in the RFC... One of those like, like, Oh, we found the bug. It's like what? You read the RFC. And just finally understood it. You know, so it's, it's that stuff. And there was an SSH bug that popped up recently. Yep. It was the same thing. It wasn't a terribly nasty critical bug. But it was, in a piece of code that had been in SSH for ever.

Bryan Brake 21:26
Yeah. I seem to remember that one, too. Yeah. I'll have to find a link to that one. So I know you're getting tired. I have one other topic I'd like to discuss because I do a lot of report writing. Well, I I probably should do a lot of report writing but at Leviathan we you know we're the PM grease the wheels we you know, work with a relationship with the the status meetings, we do the executive summary and such and I could be better writing reports some of our testers are way better at it than I am... You know, taking the taking the whole idea of the language and where where things go with this, when we, when we put findings out, we've won, we call them bugs where we call them findings, not necessarily bugs. But what I'm trying to figure out is how we can better communicate our reporting, when we're doing things like readouts, to you know, kind of resonate with both developers and management because the idea is the executive summary is supposed to be for the "managers" or senior folk and then we have like, you know, components that drill down and talk about specifics and be more technical, but, you know, often we find ourselves and I find myself because I come from a more technical background writing more technical to the executives and my question was, Is there ways of communicating risk to both the developers and the managers in the, you know, using using somewhat the same language? Or should we call the bugnot bugs or not findings. We call them, you know, hey, here's a feature you guys should implement, which would be, you know, HTTP or, you know, you must have seen a few pen test reports in your time. And I mean, what is what is your opinion of pen test reports?

Brian "Noid" Harden 23:13
So, my opinion, the most pen test reports, is that their garbage... Well, they're usually written to, they're usually written to one extreme or the other. So unfortunately, I have yet to find any really good language that appeases everybody.

Brian Boettcher 23:30
So what's the one extreme or the other?

Brian "Noid" Harden 23:32
What are the two extremes they're either hyper technical, the sort of stuff that like any of the three of us would probably look at and go, Okay, I get it, right. I understand the value here or there so high level that if I'm a business person, I might be sitting there going, Hey, okay, you know,you've you've reached out you've touched my heart. I understand that this this is a critical like this is a big issue we need to get fixed. But there's not enough meat there that if I took that report and handed it off to my dev lead and said, go fix this. The dev lead is going to sit there and go...

Brian Boettcher 24:09
Are you kidding me?

Brian "Noid" Harden 24:10
Yeah. Like, I don't know what to fix, according to this report says bad things can happen on the network. Are you telling me to go prevent bad things from happening on the network? So that's the thing. I find that Yeah, they either overwhelm you with details or there's not enough substance to them. Okay, so every once in a while, you get a really good one though, you get a you get a you get a really good one. If I could look at just a shout out to CoalFire actually, like their reports.

Unknown 24:39
I mean, okay, So, What is a happy medium type report for you? One that would satisfy the manager folks but also get with, you know, be technical enough. What kind of things would you like to see in reports that you get from them and feel free to you know, talk about the Coalfire thing I guess

Brian "Noid" Harden 25:02
*Chuckles*

Bryan Brake 25:06
*Chuckles* We're always trying to improve our reports that Leviathan we've gone through and done things like test evaluations and you know things like that and no it's fine you know they're they're cool with me doing my podcast on the side so but if you had when you get reports... the good ones... What do they look like well I mean what what kind of things that you're looking for and and and in a pen a proper pentest report?

Brian "Noid" Harden 25:30
Well for me being a technical person one of the things... the biggest thing I'm looking for in a report repro steps, right? If you haven't given me clear repo steps, then you have given me a useless report and that's the thing I've seen reports were basically it's... you know, hey man, we all we popped your domain controller you know, we did this we did that. Look at all freaking awesome we are... And you're like, Okay, I didn't hire you guys to be a circus sideshow. I hired you guys to show me where my risk is, and so I can focus my I know where to focus my efforts. And so those types of so those types of like, "look at how badass I am" reports don't do anything for me... what I do like there were reports that say hey you know we found a cross site scripting vulnerability on this particular product in this particular area. And here is not only screenshots of the cross site scripting vulnerability happening, but here's the repro steps because what's going to happen is, for example, you know, I see something like that and I go, Well, we got to fix that. I'm going to go to my developers. And the first thing my developers are going to ask me is, can you repro it? Can I read through it because one of the things they're going to do is after they fix it, they're going to validate the fix if they don't know how it was exploited in the first place. They're not going to know how to validate the fix. So being able to provide that information... down is is huge for me. Um, but then again, I'm also not, you know the business guy, I'm not the big money guy, I'm I want my report to be technical right so would the executives of my company get the same value out of the report? I probably not... you know when you're talking to the much higher level non technical people what you need to be doing is you need to be making sure you're talking in terms of risk. Sure, you know, you're talking in terms of risk and you're talking in terms of a not technical risk... You know, at the end of the day, the CEO of the company doesn't give a damn that SMBv1 is still on the network, right? They might not even know what that is, right? odds are I'm gonna I'm gonna go out and say they probably don't know what that is. Um, and even in that doesn't mean explain to them what it is because they're not going to care so first. We're going to go from not knowing what it is to not caring what it is. But if you express things in terms of risk of that, you know, the current network architecture, as it stands is very fragile and could be easily brought down, you know, through almost potentially accidental behavior, let alone. malicious behavior. You know, resulting in outages and SLA violations right now, you got their attention, because what they hear there is also if I don't fix this, it might cost me money.

Brian Boettcher 28:36
profit loss.

Brian "Noid" Harden 28:37
Yeah, and that's the thing. It's the, you know, depending on where they're at, in the org structure, you know, I've been in I've been in plenty of organizations before where downtime... downtime is bad... downtime is just, I mean, downtime is never good. But I mean, I've been in organizations where it's like, okay, so I just got promoted to like, super uber director guy. 48 hours into the gig. You know, we had like, a two hour outage,... I'm done.

Bryan Brake 29:08
Busted that SLA, big money...

Brian "Noid" Harden 29:10
even though even though I had nothing to do with it, I'm the accountable one. So, yeah, you have, you know, you need to be able to express things in terms that they translates to, you know, finding out like, like one of the things I back when I used to be a consultant, one of the things I always ask the executive types I'd meet on jobs is what keeps you up at night. You know, what keeps you up at night? Like what you know, don't don't worry about what I'm concerned about, what are you concerned about? Because they might be the same thing. I'm just going to talk to you about it using again, using the words that you care for and understand because I see a lot of technical people try to describe risk to non technical people and they do it by being highly technical and when it's not being understood. They fall back to being even more they take the approach of being in France... not speaking French. So I'm going to speak slower and louder, right? And, and at the end of the day, they're just going to keep shaking their heads going, Man, this guy really wants to express something to make.

Bryan Brake 30:18
Yeah, something must be really important...

Brian "Noid" Harden 30:20
...to agitated by it. I don't know what it is...

Bryan Brake 30:23
Great, now it's blue monkey poo. I don't know what's going on.

Brian "Noid" Harden 30:26
Yeah, so that's, that's it. So yeah. When you're when you're talking to leadership, expressing things in terms of the contract violations, SLA violations, financial financial impact, right? You know, like, like, one of the things I liked when PCI came out and they had like these ridiculous up to $10,000 per bit of PII that gets disclosed and then you explain to a room full of high level people that and if blank were to happen 40,000 bits of PII .would be exposed a you knnow and I'm not so good at math but my calculator here tells me at $10,000 a pop and you watch people in the room real quiet...

Bryan Brake 31:10
oh yeah no that now you know the thing is you just haven't seen a Leviathan one yet so you know if you want to you know reach out to us we'll do a pentest for you we when we don't mind coming out and hanging out doing pen tests for you so

Brian "Noid" Harden 31:24
Frank's a good friend, solid solid human being

Bryan Brake 31:26
no I mean will take your money and will give you a good will give you good drubbing. You will not get up and down left and right. You'll make it hurt. So anyway, actually, yeah, we we actually might need to talk about that a little bit later. I would not hate on that. I get money when people come in its new business. So yeah, I wouldn't hate on that at all.

Brian Boettcher 31:47
I like in in your last phrase or last sentence in your presentation. If you can, avoid even using the word security. I think that's a good summary of what we talked about.

Bryan Brake 32:00
Yeah, that got me too. I was like, Wow. Okay. So it's like, it's like the buzzword you're not supposed to say or, you know, like, you get a shock..

Brian "Noid" Harden 32:08
Treat it like a game. Yeah. Yeah, you got it like a game. But you you'd be amazed it works

Bryan Brake 32:16
hundred percent of the time. It works every time?

Brian "Noid" Harden 32:18
Yeah, hundred percent of the works every time. But, ya know, it it it definitely works because there are people too because there's conditioning, right. The history between security people and software developers is deep and it goes back

Bryan Brake 32:33
it's contentious

Brian "Noid" Harden 32:34
it's contentious at times. And, you know, obviously, you know, you try to try to try to be a good human being, trying to better the world around you. You know, try to,when you whenever you go somewhere, try to leave it in a better condition than you found it. But also understand that the person who may have been there for you may have just straight up just f the place up

Brian Boettcher 32:58
scorched earth

Brian "Noid" Harden 32:59
Yep, yeah. so and so. Yeah. And sometimes, because, I mean, I've got, I've rolled into organizations before where it's like, Why are these people so mad at me? I just got here... And it's like, oh, because the guy you replaced was just got off. And then and it sucks because it's not fair that you have to rebuild those damaged relationships because you didn't damage them. but life ain't fair?

Bryan Brake 33:22
Yep. Well, you know, what, the, the, the whole, you know, DevOps and those things, that was the, you know, the Elysian Fields for developers like, Oh, I can go do anything and enjoy everything, and then it's like, you know, we're, the "no" department where the, we're the where the ones are going to put manacles on them. So, you know, security folks have have got to learn to be flexible, compliance folks can't wield their hammer anymore, like they, they should, if they want to, you know, play with the developers in the devops and the management folks, we talked about this with Liz rice couple weeks ago about getting, you know, security into the devops area and it's like one we got it we gotta learn to be flexible we've got to help them understand that now yeah the bug feature stuff if I'd heard this when we were talking to her I'm almost certain she would agree with us on the fact that you know we can't treat security like security we have treated as feature enhancement in this case

Brian "Noid" Harden 34:16
it is a feature, you know it is a feature and increase the stability of the product that can get increases the customer base of the product it's right it has all the same things to it that any other feature would, but yeah but as far as the security being the note apartment thing to something else is like I still run into security people that they look at themselves as the "No" department that kind of pride themselves on Yeah, and when you find those people just call them out. I mean, just just tell them like, Look, man, that doesn't work. It's never work. Stop it now. Because when you're viewed as the "no" department, no one will ever want to work with you. Why would you want to?

Bryan Brake 34:57
Yep... you're a non-starter

Brian "Noid" Harden 34:59
Yeah, what's go because that was a bit of career advice I got at one point was that basically be solutions focused. You know, nobody wants to basically you're not going to go anywhere if you're the person who's calling out the problem and you might be calling out the problem more articulately than anybody else in the room, you might have a better understanding of the scope of them the depth of the problem, but there is a whole class of manager out there that will just be like, Man, that Noid guy, nothing but problems. Whereas if you instead say, you know, you kind of focus on the sort of the not really the problem, but rather you focus on the solution... "be solutions oriented" to sound like a business guy for a second. And it's like, yeah, you'd be that solutions oriented person, and especially if you can do it with a sort of positive spin, like I had a boss at one point I would stop in his office pissed off every once in a while, and I just be like this is screwed up and that screwed up and blah, blah blah. And he stopped and go "leave my office now and come back in and restate everything you just said. But in a positive way." I don't even know how it will then go sit in the hallway for a few minutes she would come back and I'd be like, okay,we have an opportunity for us. And I tell you I hated them for it. But name if it didn't work.

Bryan Brake 36:32
Oh god. Yeah, that would make complete sense. Yeah, coming in with a positive instead of negative.

Brian "Noid" Harden 36:40
So that's the thing. It's like yeah, even when your negativity is spot on and accurate. There's a lot of people that are like.. "ugh the person is always negative" And then sure enough, yeah, you start focusing on like, oh, you're the positive solutions oriented guy. Even while you're telling them that it's all basically like we're all going to Hell, but I'm doing it in a positive solutions oriented manner, and you'd be amazed how much traction I get you.

Bryan Brake 37:06
Mr. Boettcher, do you have any other thoughts or questions? I want to let Mr.Noid go, cuz he's getting a little ty ty, he's a bit sleepy and he needs to go to bed...

Brian Boettcher 37:15
There's a lot of great tidbits in here. I'm gonna have to listen to it again, and get all of them. And, and again, there's a lot of manager tools references here and, and manager tools, if you're not a manager, that's okay. It's not for managers, all that stuff they talk about is is really valuable to all employees.

Brian "Noid" Harden 37:39
What's it called, the manager tools podcast?

Bryan Brake 37:42
Yep.It's been going on for 12 years.

Brian Boettcher 37:45
Since 2006

Bryan Brake 37:46
Yeah, something like that. It's it's very big. We put a link to the three powers three types of power and one to rule them all in the in the show notes as well. So yeah, go listen to that. I listened to that it's it's one of my regular non-info sec podcast that I listened to, so I listen to it every Monday morning, and when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, so yeah, really, really excellent stuff. If you're, you're out there and, you know, yeah, I mean, it'll help you kind of understand, but if you're out there and you're not a manager yet, it might help you understand where your managers coming from, too.

All right. Mr. Noid how would people get a hold of you if they wanted to maybe have you for more podcasts appearances or, you know, speaking engagements or whatever? Are you going to be speaking anywhere soon?

Brian "Noid" Harden 38:39
Am I I don't know. No, I don't think I am right. Sorry. Are you going anywhere? So question? I am there you go. I am speaking soon. Yeah, I'm, I'm speaking at the NCC group. Open Forum. Oh, that's right. That's next weekend. I don't think it's actually been announced yet. Okay. It's I mean, it's cool for me to talk about it. But yes, it's...

Bryan Brake 39:02
the 12 (of March)

yeah it is the 12th in Fremont, so if you're outside of the Seattle area you're going to be SOL..

yeah they don't record that

Brian "Noid" Harden 39:15
but but I'm going to be giving basically the abbreviated version of my besides talk. they had they had an empty slot they needed to fill up... and they basically said could you do it I said sure and then they said it's 30 minutes long and I'm like well my talks an hour, but how will will make it work... they're I think they're a Tableau up in Fremont...

Bryan Brake 39:37
yeah I'm on that list and yeah I know Miss Crowell over there who's one of the senior managers at NCC she's great lady... she's actually not running she used to run it and and gave somebody else but she still helps out a when she can but yeah, really, really great quarterly open forum that NCC group puts out. Plus they put out a nice spread for dinner certainly good

Brian "Noid" Harden 40:00
I haven't been the one in a while, but they usually a lot of fun. I wouldn't last one of those I went to was a TLS 1.3

Bryan Brake 40:09
I was at that one too.

Brian "Noid" Harden 40:10
That worked out great. Because literally the following weekend, I spoke at DC 206 nice about TLS 1.2 right? and ended up getting Joe to come along and speak about TLS 1.3 and a much more authoritative manner than I could have. It's bad ass.

Bryan Brake 40:24
Yeah, Joe. Joe was on the steering committee for that.

Brian "Noid" Harden 40:28
Yep. Yeah, I think but yeah, that was also nice. He kept me honest. While I was given my talk. I periodically just look at them any kind of nod. I'm not going into the weeds yet. But yeah, as far as getting a hold of me goes the best way to do it is I'm on Twitter @_noid_ or you can email me at noid23@gmail.com

Bryan Brake 40:52
Yeah so yeah if you're in the Seattle area and the downtown Seattle area or Fremont area that's really nice place I think parking I think was at a premium The last time we were there

Brian "Noid" Harden 40:52
It's Fremont, parking is always at a premium

Bryan Brake 40:52
they're dodging bikes or whatever like motorized bicycles or whatever so you know

Brian Boettcher 40:52
scooters now

Bryan Brake 40:52
yeah I mean Fremont area they're really weird about their bicycle laws and stuff up there so

Brian "Noid" Harden 41:07
...and zoned parking so watch for your park too

Bryan Brake 41:32
I'm going to get Miss Berlin because you know she's got a lot going on she's you know heading up the mental health hackers group.. you can find her

was it hacker... god I hate this, um... she's @infosystir on Twitter. hackers mental health is her nonprofit. She's running that and you can find that @hackershealth on Twitter, she will come to your convention or conference and do a village. And and, you know it's a nice chill area you can go to, if you're interested in doing that

Brian "Noid" Harden 42:12
is truly doing the Lord's work too.

Bryan Brake 42:14
Yes she is. And we're very proud of her for all that she's doing. So yeah, her and Megan Roddy who's also one of our slack slack moderators... So speaking of our slack we have a very active slack community we just like I said we have "JB" who was promoted to moderator because it's been far too long and he's been doing the the European and Asia book club and he should have been a moderator for a while so did that today gave him access to our secret moderator channel and such and but yeah we have a social contract you can join us by emailing bds.podcast@gmail.com or hitting our Twitter which is the the podcast Twitter @brakesec and you can follow me on Twitter.@bryanbrake. Mr. Boettcher, you got a lot going on to sir how would people find you if we wanted to talk about the log MD stuff?

Brian Boettcher 43:10
yeah you just go to log-MD.com... Don't forget the dash right otherwise you'll you'll get some well nevermind...

Bryan Brake 43:20
Is it like WhiteHouse.com *laughs* that's an old joke kids!

Brian Boettcher 43:26
I'd like to say though if you if you do go by your developers donuts or whoever don't eat any between the pickup and drop off right because then you'll show up with four donuts and they'll be like oh thanks great there's 10 of us and you bring us for Donuts

Bryan Brake 43:41
{imitating Forrest Gump]"I had some sorry" Don't do that yeah

yea buy 13 donuts and then eat one for yourself and then say you got it doesn't you go yeah so you're making an appearance you're going to be Bsides Austin at the end of the month along with Ms. Berlin's going to be that one as well. I think?

Brian Boettcher 44:00
I am... Megan's going to be there I'm not sure. Very cool as her home base so we'll see. Nice. Yeah and the classes are cheap. I don't know if they're sold out yet but it's like $100 bucks.

Bryan Brake 44:13
Okay, awesome. Cool. Before we go, we have a store. If you want to go buy a T shirt for the Brakeing Down Security logo, you know, you can definitely go do that or get one with Miss Berlin's face on it. Which is very weird but it's still very cool I'm going to probably by pink one here in the next few weeks and thank you to our patrons people who help support the podcast but donating some money helps pay for hosting pays for the time that we're doing this also we're looking into adding some possible transcription services we've gotten a couple emails from people who are saying they want to get transcriptions of us saying "uh, um, ah" lot so I actually actually it was a gentleman by the name of Willie I think was said head hearing difficulties so he wanted to know if we had a transcription of the podcast and I feel really bad because I'm like I don't know how to reply to him and say I you know we're just a little mom and pop shop here so we're looking at transcription services maybe something like Mechanical Turk or there was one called otter.ai that we're we're looking at to maybe kind of make it better for people to hear these things

Brian "Noid" Harden 45:26
I'm actually actually suffer from degenerative hearing loss. I'm slowly going deaf myself

Bryan Brake 45:31
I've got tinnitus is from the Navy

Brian "Noid" Harden 45:32
same here. It's permanent and ongoing. And just yeah, it's like I feel for him. Yep. And hopefully transcriptions will be a thing at some point. Yeah, god's I hope so. Yeah, I mean, other than the US and about 800 times during podcast I apologize for that. But yeah, so we're, we're trying to look into that if if we can make it work we will we will do our utmost to make the podcast as available as possible to everybody. So in end up to be we have to hire somebody, he'll do it for us. So that that may be another thing, which means will need more pot Patreon money, you know that kind of thing. So if you're interested in getting full transcripts we may make that possible if we can get another maybe 20 to 30 people a 20-30 bucks a month. So but we do appreciate that the tips the you know we call them tips because you're helping to support the podcast and helping us get this out. And yeah, so for Miss Berlin who's not here sadly. And she's going to be kicking yourself because this was a really awesome podcast and Mr. Boettcher. This is Brakeing Down Security from a world headquarters here in Seattle. Have a great week. Be nice to another. Please take care of yourselves because you're the only you have and we'll talk again soon.

Brian Boettcher 46:45
Bye bye

Brian "Noid" Harden 46:46
Bye Internet people.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Here is a new episode of Brakeing Down Security Podcast!

Brakeing Down Security Podcast Blog

Sunday, March 24, 2019

2019-011-part 2 of our interview with Brian "Noid" Harden

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