People in technical leadership roles should have formal training and should have spent some time in the trenches, full stop. We hold most other specialized leadership roles to this standard: Chief Financial Officers, Chief Legal Officers, Chief Medical Officers, etc. Why not CTOs and CISOs?
> nasty sexism... male CISO at other company...
The article is about Equifax. I am commenting about Equifax. This is not about gender.
I'm well aware that this problem is pervasive in American business culture. The article is about Equifax. So I am commenting about Equifax.
> Turns out Susan Maudin at Equifax had decades of relevant experience:
Those are all also management roles. She went from non-cybersecurity into cybersecurity management and then worked her way up the management chain.
She had no formal training in IT/CS, no experience as an IC in IT/CS, and her organization royally screwed up.
Expecting relevant formal education and relevant IC experience is not sexist.
The vast majority of qualified candidates will not have relevant formal training. Until very recently it's been borderline impossible to get an infosec degree, and what little opportunities existed were of atrocious quality.
>Oh, please. I'm well aware that this problem is pervasive in American business culture. The article is about Equifax. I am commenting about Equifax.
1) It's not a problem
2) It's not American
This is just how emerging fields are, you can't have formal education when nobody knows what to teach.
You will never convince me that Equifax could not have hired a CISO with decades of relevant IC and leadership experience and appropriate educational background. Perhaps Maudin at the time she was hired, I'm not sure the length of her tenure. But there was certainly no excuse for choosing an MBA without IC cybersecurity experience for her replacement. (Who, btw, is a man and also wildly unqualified except for a string of other executive positions that he also should not have been in... happy now?)
>> The article is about Equifax. I am commenting about Equifax.
> 1) It's not a problem
You have got to be kidding me.
1. Equifax majorly shit the bed on cybersecurity, and the buck stops at the CISO.
2. Why is this not the case for CFOs, CMOs, CLOs, and literally every other technical chief officer position except CTOs and CISOs? Again, it's not the 90s.
If it's so easy, surely you can name a couple of people with decades of relevant IC and leadership experience and appropriate educational background who they could have hired back when they went with Maudin?
>1. Equifax majorly shit the bed on cybersecurity, and the buck stops at the CISO.
The buck never stops at the CISO, just like it supposedly didn't at Twitter.
Yes, I can name dozens of people who would have made excellent CISOs in 2017 and meet my (low) bar of (1) relevant IC experience and (2) some relevant formal training.
> The buck never stops at the CISO, just like it supposedly didn't at Twitter.
If the buck doesn't stop there, it certainly passes through.
Let me flip this around: should you hire a Software Engineer with decades of management experience at a bank to the Chief Financial Officer? What about lawyer who's worked at a hospital to be the Chief Medical Officer? Would you hire an MBA without any legal experience to be your Chief Legal Officer? No, no, and no. If a company did any of those things and shit hit the fan, people would be irate and the company would be rightly criticized.
So why is it okay to fill CTO and CISO roles with MBAs who have no technical training or experience?
It's not, and I don't think juries are going to put up with this over the next couple decades. The "new field" argument is increasingly implausible.
I'm sure it's easy to find lots of qualified people with compsci degrees, but that's not a relevant degree.
My current employer's CISO or my former employer's equivalent of the CISO. Both were hired prior to 2017 and had relevant education and expertise. And no, I'm not going to risk doxing myself to someone accusing me of sexism for saying that CTO/CISO roles should be filled by people with relevant education.
> Compsci is not an infosec-related degree.
Are you kidding me? I am beginning to lose confidence in any ability to have a reasonable conversation with you.
Four years of CS cover a lot of material that is directly relevant to information security, even without any formal coursework in security. Most CS degrees require several years of programming, an Operating Systems course, and courses like Networking, Cybersecurity, and Cryptography are often offered as electives. Even the basic courses offer a lot of basic knowledge about the work being managed.
Is it everything you need? No, of course not! That's why the criteria -- from my first post -- is BOTH relevant education and also relevant IC experience.
What is inappropriate is a CISO who has never written or read a single line of code, never configured a piece of IT equipment, etc. It would be like a CLO who has never read a legal brief or a chief medical officer who has never treated a patient. They won't even have a basic high-level understanding of what's actually going on in the work they are managing. I've seen this, first hand, from a (male) executive who did not have a technical background.
I think it's a reasonable conclusion to draw, due to the nature of the very sensitive data at risk.
Having professional accreditation that you should be overseeing the security of peoples most sensitive information is objectively a good idea.
Muddying the conversation with virtual signaling is more surprising to see on HN.
Except it seemingly doesn't apply to literally every other CISO. Does the CISO at Meta have a relevant degree? No. Did Mudge have a relevant degree while he was the CISO at Twitter? No, he also had a music degree. Does Coinbase CISO in charge of securing many billions hold a relevant degree? Nope. Does the CISO at Stripe hold a relevant degree? Again nope.
>Having professional accreditation that you should be overseeing the security of peoples most sensitive information is objectively a good idea.
It's a good idea, yes! Did some meaningful professional accreditation exist at the time? Nope!
How is it sexism if it's true? Or should people not bring this up because she's a woman?
I think the problem is Equifax's record of handling (non-consenting) user's data, and that causes resentment - not that the CISO was a woman.
Nobody would ever bring this up about a man, most CISOs have similar degrees. You haven't even been able to get a formal education on this topic for very long.
I'm sick of MBAs with no domain expertise or formal training ruining lives. Making that about gender is insane.
She was incompetent and should be in jail.
I haven't heard anyone saying that about Metas CISO, or Twitters CISO, or Ubers CISO.
For example, the data leaked from Uber in the recent breach is way more impactful than anything which ever leaked from Equifax.
But hey, maybe that's just because nobody noticed that Latha Maripuri is also a woman.
>She was incompetent and should be in jail.
How would you know it wasn't her superiors constantly blocking her from doing her job properly?
What could be more impactful than the social security numbers, personal information, and financial records of every adult in the US?
>But hey, maybe that's just because nobody noticed that Latha Maripuri is also a woman.
Yes, that should tell you that gender has nothing to do with it which you are vehemently trying to make this about.
>How would you know it wasn't her superiors constantly blocking her from doing her job properly?
I don't know that, that's why the company should have been liquidated as compensation, or at the very least it should have been taken to court where she can testify to what she tried to do and what she was blocked from doing. Otherwise, the responsibility lies with her -- that is literally her job description.
You could already buy just about any adults SSN for a dollar from various breach aggregators well before the equifax leak, so literally nothing changed in that regard.
Personal information? What? Names, addresses, dates of birth? The above still applies.
Uber holds very detailed location data, travel histories. Far more revealing than what might have come
>Yes, that should tell you that gender has nothing to do with it which you are vehemently trying to make this about.
I'm not sure you can seriously read anything into that, it's essentially random whether or not these things get picked up.
Or why do you think that Susan Mauldin is widely ridiculed but Latha Maripuri is not? Both have very similar resumes, no formal qualifications and presided over massive breaches.
>I don't know that, that's why the company should have been liquidated as compensation, or at the very least it should have been taken to court where she can testify to what she tried to do and what she was blocked from doing. Otherwise, the responsibility lies with her -- that is literally her job description.
This doesn't make any sense. You don't know and the possible actual culprits did not tell you otherwise, so the responsibility lies with her?
Not only is this entirely speculative and needs a citation, just because others have experienced breaches doesn't mean you get to publicize private information, that once again, people did not consent to because they're not users or customers of Equifax.
>You don't know and the possible actual culprits did not tell you otherwise, so the responsibility lies with her?
Yes, that is the role of a Chief Information Security Officer. Here is a brief description for your reference:
>The CISO (chief information security officer) is a senior-level executive responsible for developing and implementing an information security program, which includes procedures and policies designed to protect enterprise communications, systems and assets from both internal and external threats.
Unless other information comes out to suggest otherwise, yes, it is very fair to assume the responsibility lies with her.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/09/data-broker-giants-hacke...
From 2013, but this stuff has been out on all the crime forums since early 2000s.
SSN leaks have not mattered for a long time.