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Defense in Depth

How Security Leaders Deal with Intense Stress

When you have an incident and you're engulfed by the stress that lasts more than a day, how do you manage and deal with it? And not only how do you manage your stress, but how do you manage everyone else's?

Check out this post for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week’s episode co-hosted by me, David Spark, the producer of CISO Series, and Geoff Belknap, CISO, LinkedIn. Joining us is our special guest, Tim Brown, CISO, Solarwinds.

Even if you’re leading the security team, it’s still a team. "Never do it alone! Send a third of the team home at the beginning of the incident so you can rotate people in and out, including for yourself," said Yaron Levi, CISO at Dolby Laboratories. Steve Zalewski also reminded us to marshall wider organization resources in a crisis, saying, "I had a SOC manager whose philosophy was ‘during a major incident, everyone in IT worked for him.’ It shared the stress across a team rather than focusing it on a few individuals."

Even if you’re leading the security team, leadership also needs to stay in the loop. Be proactive with this communication so it doesn’t become another stressor. "Give regular updates to leadership before they ask,” said Shweta Kshirsagar of Myntra. Edwin Covert of Bowhead Speciality echoed this advice, saying “managing expectations and being realistic with timelines is critical." This way communications with leadership are part of the response plan, and not an unexpected complication.

Major incidents don’t just disrupt work life.Round the clock response disrupts all routines, both at work and at home. "During one incident we ordered meals for the core responding team and their families until work got back to normal. Part of the stress is how life at home is affected,” said Jerich Beason, CISO at Capital One. There are a lot of tools to use to keep teams productive during an incident, but Simon Goldsmith of OVO reminds us to use those in the context of “having a vision of the mindset you want your team to adopt when it matters.”

Training can go a long way to get teams ready.While it won’t eliminate stress, this training can at least help teams be prepared for what's coming. "If you've only planned once, your ability to observe, orient, decide, and act will be slow. Our field doesn't necessarily have that same level of crisis response requirement as firefighting, and law enforcement," said Shawn M Bowen, CISO at World Fuel Services.

Please listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app, or over on our blog where you can read the full transcript. If you’re not already subscribed to the Defense in Depth podcast, please go ahead and subscribe now.

Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Push Security

LIVE!

CISO Series Podcast LIVE in Santa Monica, CA 10-5-2023

We did it last year and we’re doing it again. CISO Series Podcast is coming to be the closing entertainment on October 5th, 2023 at ISSA-LA Information Security Summit XIII in Santa Monica. This full day event is held at the Annenberg Community Beach House, a gorgeous location right on the beach in Santa Monica. To attend the event, you will need to get tickets which you can get right here.

On stage with me will be Chenxi Wang, managing general partner with Rain Capital.

Please come on out for a day of cyber learning with your west coast cyber friends.Thanks to our sponsor, Veza

Creating a Security Culture Through User Experience

CISO Series reporter Steve Prentice recently wrote an excellent article on how to build a culture of security within your organization. We recently shared that post on LinkedIn and asked our CISO community to weigh in with some of their best practices. We got fantastic thoughts in response, many hitting on the theme that user experience is a key part of an overall security culture. Kathy Wang, former CISO at Discord, summed it up best by saying, "Whatever actions Security would like users to take, make sure that's the easiest thing for users to do."Check out the video on LinkedIn and all the awesome people who provided additional insight.

Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Code42

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