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March kicked off our planning for a Cybersecurity Awareness Limerick Month. If top 10 lists and powerpoint presentations aren’t delivering, then maybe it’s time to try a new format for delivering awareness. Stay tuned and stay CALM. ;)
Emily Fox walked us through the mistakes orgs make with vuln management, how they can manage risk without burning out devs, and why the boring basics make everything easier. She explains how orgs can be more comfortable with eventually fixing vulns instead of fighting every fire they see.
Lebin Cheng gave us an update on the state of API security and why they will remain a profitable target. After all, a lot of successful attacks have all the patterns of normal traffic – exercising business logic vulns rarely relies on the obvious payloads that stand out in things like XSS and other injection attacks.
Tyler Von Moll gave us a perspective on starting a cybersecurity program and how appsec fits into that. We’re neither surprised nor disappointed (honestly!) that appsec isn’t the first thing every org should be doing. It’s eventually important and one of the things we try to do here is figure out how to define eventually.
Benedek Gagyi closed out the month with our first in-depth discussion on how user experience (UX) impacts security. Despite being one of my favorite topics, we hadn’t given this nearly the attention it deserves. Benedek walks through some examples of bad UX leads to behaviors that are against users interests and how good UX makes apps better.
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the February 2024 recap.
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February brought us the Lunar New Year, a Leap Day, and more OWASP projects than we expected!
Grant Ongers kicked off our February shows with a preview of his new OWASP project – the Product Security Capability Framework. He explains how it relates to efforts like ASVS and SAMM and, importantly, why it’s not just another top 10 list.
Then Christien Rioux talked about code scanning strategies and how better visibility into code translates to more meaningful flaws to pay attention to. He shares how seeing what’s running in prod and what prod systems are talking to helps dev teams far more than a long list of potential vulns.
Episode 223 (from the vault)
We went back to the vault for week three, bringing back a discussion on successful threat modeling with Jeevan Singh. Our focus wasn’t so much on the nuances of threat models, but the adjectives around them – successful and scalable. All too often appsec teams say “do threat modeling” and mistake an approach that works once with a process that needs to scale.
As a mirror to the start of the month, Farshad Abasi to talk about his upcoming OWASP project – the Secure Pipeline Verification Standard. One of the motivations for this was that, sure, there’s a top 10 list, but there are no solutions. It’s great to see more projects focusing on frameworks and design patterns that dev teams can follow to secure how code is compiled into artifacts and artifacts are sent to prod.
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the January 2024 recap.
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January brings a new year and a new vision for appsec. Let’s leave behind lists and think less about shifting and more about expanding security.
Episode 200 (from the vault)
The first show we posted for 2024 came from the vault. Back in July 2022 Keith Hoodlet came by to help celebrate the 200th episode. Keith started the show with episode 0. Since then he’s been blogging at [securing.dev] about #appsec (of course) and DevOps. Even though this is a news segment, two of the articles were about careers and career development – and surely still relevant today.
In the first show we recorded for 2024, John Kinsella shared his take on “appsec in three words” along with a few favorite responses from last year’s guests. Then we talked about where we hope this year takes appsec and some topics that we hope to move on from. It’ll be no surprise to see more AI and supply chain items in the news. It’ll be even better if those items aren’t about more prompt injection or more shift left – some things can stay in 2023.
Eve Maler returned with recommendations for communicating technical topics to different audiences. It’s part of the theme of presentations that we covered quite a bit in 2023. This time we focused on the importance of communication skills at work.
Sandy Carielli is another guest we always love to have on the show. We talked about bad bots and their impact on products and the user experience – where there are items of value there are bots. Sandy also makes the point that value isn’t always in obvious items like concert tickets, limited edition clothing, and credentials. Bots can also drive inauthentic reviews and artificial popularity, which is as relevant to products as it is to politics.
We wrapped up January with one last discussion on delivering presentations. This time Sarah Harvey gave a conference organizer’s perspective. Sarah shared some of her own techniques for crafting slides and giving a coherent conference talk. She also explained how conferences like BSides SF actively support new speakers by offering practice sessions and constructive feedback. Giving constructive feedback is its own skill and one that’s relevant to corporate environments in addition to conferences.
Subscribe to ASW to find these episodes and more! Also check out the December 2023 recap.
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