As infosec practitioners, we often operate in a vacuum or within silos. Reaching out to others in the community to share ideas, indicators, and problems helps to build a more relevant, diverse security program. Find out about a specific threat or incident as it unfolds: learn what others are doing tactically to combat this threat along with mitigation strategies. Get out of that vacuum. Once we can accept that security does not provide a competitive advantage, doors to information sharing will open, and everyone will see the benefit. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all the ships. In this talk, I will show ways that security peeps at all career levels can effectively share information. Analyst-to-analyst communication is just as important as management-to-management communication. Certain avenues already exist like ISACs, but they constrain the sharing to a sector vertical. There are opportunities I will present that go beyond ISACs. I will discuss the legal challenges as well as solutions we’ve found for overcoming them. An end goal is to facilitate the development of professional and trusted relationships among peers and subject matter experts to protect our organizations. Additionally, I would like to introduce an idea for getting feedback on documentation. Infosec Peer Review is a concept to facilitate sharing of documents such as policies, procedures, and reports and getting constructive feedback on them in a secure way.
Chris Mills manages the incident response team for a large financial services company. He also co-hosts the SecuraBit Podcast. He is active in his sector’s information sharing programs and encourages others to participate.