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IT and Cybersecurity: the Importance of Knowledge and Empathy · CYBR.Signal

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, happy Cyber Sunday.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Farnum here.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're doing well.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Want to talk about a session that or presentation that Dr.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Gerald Auger and I put on out at the Elevate IT Houston Technology Summit that was on Wednesday of last week.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Casey Arborel, thank you very much.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: She runs Elevate IT.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for uh letting us come out there and uh do this talk.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the talk was all about the kind of the differences between typical IT jobs, technology jobs, where you're you're working in the information technology group, and then information security slash cybersecurity, whatever you want to call it.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I call it cyber, so I'm just gonna keep calling it that throughout this.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: But so the kind of the point was is trying to develop empathy from the cybersecurity side into the IT side versus the other way around.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: We always talk about how it complains about cyber and how we're the department of know.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those those are changing, those attitudes are generally changing.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: But what we don't talk about as much is how much cyber tends to kind of gripe about IT and them being all about availability of the services versus where we're more about making sure they're confidential, they've got integrity, you know, the whole CIA triad.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you subscribe to that uh that way of thinking, but it's it was just interesting as a topic for us to bring up because what we've seen in the last probably 10 years or so is where you've got people going directly into cybersecurity as a job, and you don't have as many people who go through the IT department to get to cyber.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Myself, that's where I came up through.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: I came up as a bench tech building computers, and then started doing networking and started doing local areas and wide areas and built all of that, had the big iron uh big Cisco catalyst 5000 switch and all these things, and it was a lot of fun putting all that together.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the first time I saw a firewall doing its thing and figured that out, it was just like really struck me.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to get more into security side of things instead of just straight IT.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of people who don't do that now, they just go straight into cybersecurity, either through some kind of analyst job or something like that, and they don't go through the IT route.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what ends up happening is a couple of things, it's kind of what we talked about.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: One, which I think was it's a big component, but it's not as big as what we were trying to get across all the way around, which was if you don't go through networking and do and learn the networking side of things, it's you kind of have you can have some shortcomings possibly on what you know about security.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can be very focused on security and not have to know all of that stuff, it just really depends on what you're doing, like if you're in a more non-technical route or some things like that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: But generally, having knowledge of what packets look like and what how something traverses around a network, and those can those are kind of integral to being able to threat hunt and know how things move around your network, how you could um have east-west movement and not just north-south, so somebody's laterally moving in your environment.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are important to know, and some of those basic concepts may get taught in a class or something, but they don't necessarily, the people in cyber don't necessarily have the experience of how those things work, and that's kind of an important thing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the the second part was about the empathy that cyber security people need to have for how IT does their job.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have empathy for what they're doing and realizing that they're all about availability, they have to make sure the services are are up so the business can keep working and operating.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: If all you want to do is talk about security, security, security, and not have that empathy across the board.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it can lead to some really big rifts in some organizations.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I talked about in the talk, we've got a couple of customers, um, it's more than two, but these are these stand out a lot where they've got a whole lot of vitriol and rancor and all those fancy words for um how they the network team and the security team interact with each other, and it really is a dysfunctional relationship in a lot of ways and hurts the company.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's gonna get posted soon online.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh go check it out and I'll try to update here.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: But just think about it if you're on the cyber side, are you have you come up from the IT side of things?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had have not, do you have some of the basic knowledge that you need or some basic experience?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: You may have the knowledge, but maybe not the experience.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then do you have empathy for how IT is doing their job and what they have to do on a day in, day out basis?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And make sure you realize that they have a very important job as well, and it's not all just about security.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So let me know what you think.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to you next time.