David Harvey, CISSP is a principal consultant with Synopsys. David evaluates agile practices, leads code reviews, and trains developers on defensive coding and threat modeling. Prior to joining Synopsys, he worked for UnitedHealth Group where he co-founded and led a developer-facing software security initiative. David has also worked as an architect and developer at Siemens, Boeing, and Unisys. He learned about software security when the ‘information superhighway’ was just becoming a thing and Fortune 20 companies were starting to bear the brunt of unsanitary design and coding practices that had been de rigueur in the old, segregated, safe ‘client-server’ or ‘feudal’ deployment models.
Bryan Sullivan, a Security Program Manager at Microsoft, called threat modeling a “cornerstone of the SDL” during a Black Hat Conference presentation. He calls it a ‘cornerstone’ because a properly executed threat model:
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Software security training is an important part of software development. In the latest Ponemon study on data breaches, training and awareness programs are the number one control implemented after a data breach. However, as with any security control, it’s possible to incorrectly implement training. Within this post, I’ll discuss several common software security training hurdles that organizations often experience, and explore how to prevent and/or overcome these problems.
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The official organizational response to a data breach almost always includes the statement: “We met all regulatory and legal requirements for data protection.” Training is required for many compliance regimes, and it might just be good enough as a compliance control. However, as a security control it’s inadequate. There are multiple major retailers that were fully compliant with regulations, and yet they suffered massive breaches. Major health insurance giants were also fully compliant with HIPAA at the time of a breach exposing the “protected” sensitive information of millions.
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In 2015, thousands of U.S. taxpayers attempting to file a tax return discovered that a return had already been filed on their behalf with a tax refund deposited into an unknown account. An investigation showed that a service known as Get Transcript was used to access the data of at least 700,000 individuals. That data was then used to file bogus tax returns on behalf of the victims with refunds already distributed to criminals. Here, we’ll address the shortcomings of the IRS’s Get Transcript service and discuss ways in which these widespread attacks could have been prevented. Root cause: Identity proofing gone bad The intended purpose of the Get Transcript service is to allow a tax payer to retrieve their own previously-filed tax returns for record keeping or amending a previous return, among other uses.
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Agile is a great innovation in software development. The Agile focus on stakeholder involvement end-to-end, transparency and short delivery cycles are changes for the better for our industry. However, just-in-time nature of requirements, bug and flaw triage in agile makes it all the more critical that everyone on the team has a certain level of security knowledge. The moving parts of the Agile methodology make it even more important to properly “build security in” and this requires trained people and good supporting infrastructure. This is especially critical for development efforts that handle sensitive or confidential data. The problem with software development and software security “Testing can prove the presence of bugs, but not their absence.”
Posted in Agile, CI/CD & DevOps, Security Training, Software Architecture and Design, Static Analysis (SAST) | Comments Off on How to create an effective software security training program for Agile teams