Secure360 2025 was last week, and I have to say that it was the best one I’ve attended in years!
I got something from each of the sessions I attended. The highlights for me included:
A pre-conference session, Encrypted Chaos, a realistic breach simulation where participants took on unfamiliar roles (Legal, HR, Communications, etc.) that showed how organizations (not the security team) need to make decisions and take action during a (cybersecurity) crisis.
Jay Jacob’s presentation on Five years of EPSS, the Exploit Prediction Scoring System, and lessons Jay learned from studying vulnerabilities and exploitation data.
Not one but two presentations by the FBI, one on the takedown of the Genesis marketplace, and the other a career retrospective from Special Agent Liz Lehrkamp, who worked in cyber crimes (among other assignments) and was an early advocate for community partnership with law enforcement.
Two regional representatives from my new favorite government agency, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency shared the numerous free (taxpayer-funded) resources that CISA has available.
The last session of the conference (for me) was my talk, Getting started with risk quantification using quantrr. We had over 50 attendees, which isn’t bad considering the subject and the time slot. I demoed the latest version of quantrr, which was first presented at SIRAcon 2024. I had great engagement, and the session ran the full hour, most of which was an interactive review of the sample report. A few people expressed their interest in trying out the tool, which has inspired me to work on adding code to support comparison of baseline risk against one or more treatments, which is needed to calculate return on investment. Look for a new release soon!
Slides
My slides with notes, including references, are here. Links to all my work are available at https://jbenninghoff.com.
Session Description
Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) is a proven method for helping organizations make better decisions about security investments by summarizing expert knowledge, but getting started can be difficult. Commercial tools are expensive, and free tools have usage restrictions and can be difficult to use. quantrr, a free and open source tool, was created to help people with limited time and no budget get started with CRQ. This talk shows how to forecast risk using expert estimates and Monte Carlo simulation through an interactive demonstration in quantrr using a realistic example scenario, the 30 year old Widget Management System. It covers getting better estimates from experts, modeling loss frequency and magnitude from public breach data, and the critical question to uncover new risks. We close with practical advice from early successes and misses quantifying risk.
Participants are welcome to download and install quantrr and follow along with the session! Instructions can be found at: https://jabenninghoff.github.io/quantrr/.
The talk consolidates ideas from my past work in a presentation geared towards a broad but still tech-savvy audience. The core ideas are simple: first, security isn’t about avoiding negative outcomes (breaches), it’s about improving security performance, and second, that most of the activities that improve security performance don’t require security expertise.
While my solo talk wasn’t recorded, the slides are available here.
Abstract
You don’t have to be Mr. Robot to be secure! While cybersecurity may seem mysterious and difficult, the most effective things you can do are like eating well and exercising: easy to understand, but sometimes hard to do. In the past 5 years, we’ve learned that much of the work needed to secure software-based systems are activities we already do, like regularly updating software and turning off services you don’t need.
I’ll review what data-driven research says about what matters most in cybersecurity, bust myths about what doesn’t matter, and when you really do need to call in the experts. Whether you write code, build infrastructure, run a startup, or just manage your home network, I’ll share practical advice on what you can do to be secure and what you should leave to others.
Slides
My slides with notes, including references, are here.
I had a great time attending - and speaking - last week at SREcon25 Americas!
2025-04-22 Update: a video of my talk is now available on my presentation page.
This was my second time at SREcon (in person), and once again I enjoyed both the talks as well as the conversations I had with other attendees. I also got to meet and reconnect with fellow members in the newly formed Resilience in Software Foundation.
My own talk, ‘Is the S in SRE for “Security”?’, went well, and I got positive feedback from people in attendance, including one person who went to my session by accident! The one thing I’d do differently next time would be to have a stronger call to action - if you are part of either a Cybersecurity or SRE team, my challenge to you is this: get to know your counterparts, learn about their work, and bring your unique skills to help them with their mission. I truly believe organizations will be better off if SRE and Security teams have a combined approach to inventory, configuration, patch management, observability, incident response, and testing.
Thanks also to the Minneapolis CNCF Community, who invited me to present a preview of my talk. Your feedback and questions helped make SREcon a success!
Abstract
There is significant overlap between Cybersecurity and SRE; understanding and leveraging that can improve the performance of both. Lessons from safety science tell us that security and SRE come through being successful more often, not failing less. Research in DevOps, Software Security, and elsewhere shows a strong link between different types of organizational performance, including development, operations, SRE, and security; in many cases, organizations most effectively reduce cybersecurity risk by improving general technology performance.
Many SRE capabilities overlap with Security, including the critical activities of patching & managing attack surface, along with observability, incident response, postmortems, testing, and platform engineering. SRE and Security teams can collaborate by supporting their mutual goals, sharing their perspectives dealing with incidents both frequent and rare, and by setting Security Level Objectives to inform decisions on when to divert resources to security as SRE teams do with Service Level Objectives.
Slides
My slides with notes, including references, are here.
Video
All USENIX conferences are Open Access! Slides and recordings are available for all past SREcon events, and a video of my talk is available on my presentation page!
