OWASP Global AppSec Dublin 2023

Tanya Janca Speaking on stage

Recently I had the pleasure of being one of the keynote speakers at OWASP Global AppSec, in Dublin Ireland. In this post I’m going to give a brief overview of some of the talks I saw while I was there, and the TONS of fun I had. I didn’t get to stay very long, and due to jetlag I fell asleep a few times when I wished I could have stayed awake, but overall I would recommend this event (and all the OWASP Global AppSec events) to anyone who is interested in application security, OWASP, or Guinness beer. This is going to be a long blog post, get yourself a beverage and get ready for lots of pictures!

I landed the morning before the conference, and met up with two friends I hadn’t seen in far too long, Takaharu Ogasa from Japan, and Vandana Verma from Bangalore India. I also met another speaker for the event named Meghan Jacquot!

Takaharu Ogasa, Tanya Janca, Vandana Verma and Meghan Jacquot!

The evening before the conference I had wanted to set up a We Hack Purple in-person meetup, but I was running short on time. Luckily, my friends at SemGrep invited me to a free pre-conference networking event, so I invited all the WHP folks to meet me there. Unfortunately, WAY too many people where there (the place was supposed to hold 50-100 people, but 200 showed up). Although I got to see many friendly faces (see Jessica Robinson, Vandana and I below), it was far too crowded for me. As a Canadian, we’re used to 13 square kilometres of personal space, per person, and it was a bit much for me. ;-D

Tanya Janca, Vandana Verma and Jessica Robinson

Luckily Adam Shostack invited me to a super-secret-speaker’s dinner the same evening, held in a giant church that had been converted into an amazing live music venue! There were tap dancers, fiddlers, OWASP Board Members, and Adam did an impromptu book signing!!! Thank you Adam! Next to Adam is Avi Douglen of the OWASP Board of Directors, and also an avid threat modeller.

Adam Shostack signing books, with Avi Douglen

The next day I woke up extremely early (6:00 am), thanks to a crying baby in the room next to mine at the hotel. :-/  I used this time to call home and practice my talk: Shifting Security Everywhere. You can download a summary of my presentation here. (Note: you are supposed to join my mailing list to receive the PDF, but my mailing list is awesome, so hopefully you feel it’s a good trade. Also, you can easily get around this if you truly do not want to subscribe, simply do not press the ‘confirm subscription’ link).

Grant Ongers, from the OWASP board of directors, kicked off the conference by announcing a brand-new award “OWASP Distinguished Lifetime Member” and then announced the first 4 winners: Simon Bennetts, Rick Mitchell, Ricardo Pereira, and Jim Manico.  As a person who has volunteered many hours for OWASP, I felt it was beautiful to see 4 extremely dedicated volunteers receive this much-deserved award. I am very proud of all of them and their amazing contributions to our community! Great job OWASP for thinking of this new way to show appreciation by publicly recognizing some of our most-dedicated volunteers!

Grant Ongers presenting award to Simon Bennetts

The very first talk of the conference was called “A Taste of Privacy Threat Modeling” by a woman named Kim Wuyts, introduce by Avi Douglen (Member of OWASP Board of Directors). She spoke about threat modelling privacy, and used ice cream analogies to explain how marketers see our data. I like ice cream, privacy, AND threat modelling, so this was a real treat (pun intended!). I care a lot about privacy, both personally and professionally, and loved how she used situations we are all familiar with (including eating ice cream too fast then ending up with brain freeze!) to explain various concepts within privacy and threat modelling. I feel like any person, with zero previous technical experience or knowledge, would have been able to follow her entire talk, which is quite rare at a conference like this. She also made her OWN threat modelling privacy game! Nicely done Kim!

After that I went to see Chris Romeo’s talk about “Ten DevSecOps Culture Fails”. Chris is also the host of the Application Security podcast, and I’ve been following his work for quite a while. He did not disappoint!

Chris Romeo, speaking

After the delicious lunch of yummy curry and rice, and more than one latte, we had the afternoon keynote. Grant Ongers introduced Jessica Robinson, who explained “Why winning the war in cyber means winning more of the everyday battles”. She shared several personal stories from her career, including what it was like to be a woman of colour working in STEM, her obsession with the Kennedys, implementing the first cyber security policy at a large law firm in New York City, and more! The thing I liked most about her presentation was how she took us on a journey. She’s an incredibly gifted public speaker, and she started by getting us all to close our eyes, then imagine various things, before opening our eyes and formally beginning her talk.

Part way through Jess’ presentation the videographer fainted, fell, and made a huge loud noise. He’s okay, don’t worry readers! All 500 of us turned around and started becoming concerned. She inquired as to if he was okay, a bunch of staff rushed to take care of him, and once it was clear there was no danger, she recommenced her talk. Not very many speakers would be able to recover like she did. To be able to fully capture our attention again was very impressive. I’m say this as a person who was a professional entertainer for 17 years, and then professional public speaker for 6 years; that is an incredible feat. By the end I had completely forgotten about the fainting, because I was so wrapped up in her and the tales she was telling. Anyway, she’s amazing.

Jessica Robinson, being amazing

At this point I have a silly complaint. Usually when I go to an InfoSec conference, there are only a handful of talks that interest me. I always want to see all of the AppSec talks, maybe some quantum computing, anything to do with using AI to create better security, or topics about cyber warfare (which equally interest and frighten me). But it’s rare at a conference that is not AppSec-focused that I have conflicts in the schedule of things that I really want to see. This happened a LOT at this conference. Sometimes there would be 3 different talks, at the same time, that I was dying to see. I found it very difficult to choose for some of the time slots, which may sound strange, but I’m a very decisive person. Not being able to decide is rare for me. That said, I am pleased to report that all of them were recorded, even if we all know it’s not quite as good as being there in person. I will try to add links to all the talks listed here once the videos are out so that you can enjoy them too!

Seba Deleersnyder and Bart De Win

This is my favourite picture from the entire conference. When you work on an open-source project with someone, you are working because you love what you are doing. When everyone on your team really cares about your goal, you can become very good friends. It is very clear the SAMM team are great friends! I love seeing OWASP bring people together! <3

The talk from the image above was about the OWASP SAMM project – The Software Assurance Maturity Model, presented by Seba Deleersnyder and Bart De Win. I live tweeted their talk (link here), if you want a play-by-play. The essence of their presentation was updates about the project from the past 2-3 years, and how they have worked with the community and industry to update, expand, and improve the model to be more helpful, by creating tools, surveys and online documentation to make their project more useful for everyone. I had been planning on writing a blog post about the project called “OWASP SAMM, for the rest of us”, because I find clients are often very insecure that they won’t ‘measure up’ to the SAMM standard. I hope I can help a bit by breaking things down into smaller pieces, and helping teams start where they are at, then working their way up over time. SAMM can work for any team, just be realistic and try not to be too hard on yourself! We all have to start somewhere.  

After Seba and Bart’s talk it was time for the networking event. OBVIOUSLY, they had Guinness beer on tap! We were in Ireland! I had a great time, chatting with all sorts of people, and I got an awesome gift of a Tigger-striped hoodie from Avi Douglen, which made my day! Then I went back to my hotel room to practice my talk, approximately a thousand times.

Tanya Janca, presenting on a stage

Side note: Remember the baby in the hotel room next to mine? The night before my talk it started crying, loudly, at 3:00 AM, and continued crying all the way until 6:00 am. I was up almost the entire night. Which gave me plenty of time to practice my talk. Yay?

Usually when you see me present a ‘new’ talk at a conference, it is not the first time that I have presented it. In fact, I have often given it 5 to 10 times, in front of 1 or 2 people each time, which is why I usually seem so comfortable on stage. I always practice new material on people from my community (We Hack Purple, OWASP Ottawa, the Ottawa Ladies Code Meetup, WoSEC Victoria, etc.). I’ve always turned to my community for feedback, advice, and encouragement. They have always been gentle, kind, and give reliably fantastic advice! I would recommend every speaker do this! But this time, because I was asked to do this with so little time, I hadn’t presented it in front of anyone. In fact, I was still writing it as I flew across the ocean to the venue. I WAS SO NERVOUS!!!!!

Tanya Janca, presenting on stage

But it went really well anyway!  Phew! And Matt Tesauro introduced me, so that was extra-nice! Matt is on the OWASP Board of directors and a leader of the Defect Dojo Project. Actually, he’s been a part of several different projects and chapters over the years. He was kind enough to distribute the maple-candies I brought to give to all the people who asked questions. Having a long-time friend introduce me made me a lot less nervous! Thank you Matt!

Tanya Janca, smiling for the camera

Now that my talk was over, I could concentrate completely on having fun! I ended up in the hallway speaking to lots of people and missing the talk after mine. Then we had lunch, and then came another time slot where there were THREE talks I wanted to see. THREE amazing presentations to choose from! I ended up in Tal Melamed’s talk, about the OWASP Serverless Top Ten. I had spoken to Tal many times before, but it was our first time meeting in person, so that was pretty exciting for me. I even managed to sit with him for lunch! Even though I already knew the Serverless Top Ten, it was still exciting to see Tal speak to it. As a bonus, he ended slightly early, so I was able to catch the Q&A after Matt Tesauro’s talk about Hacking and Defending APIs – Red and Blue make Purple. I felt this was a good compromise.

After lunch the wonderful Vandana Verma got on stage to introduce the last keynote speaker. She told us all that there would be “a BIG announcement” at 5:30 pm, so we had better not leave early. For those that don’t know, the big announcement was that OWASP has officially changed their name (but not the acronym). Previously it stood for ‘Open Web Application Security Project”, but that name was limiting. People often complained that we kept straying outside our purpose, by including cloud, containers, etc. But why would we want to limit ourselves like that? So the board of directors voted to change it to “Open World Wide Application Security Project”, which I have to say, I like WAY BETTER. Nicely done board!

The last keynote was Dr. Magda Chelly, and it was spectacular! In her talk, AI-Assisted Coding: The Future of Software Development; between Challenges and Benefits, she spoke about how AI is going to change the way most of us work, especially those of us in IT. I don’t want to give away the entire talk, but… She explained how many of us could work with AI, the difference between AI-assisted and AI-created content (this is more important that I had previously realized), and all the issues and questions around who owns the copyright of such work. If an AI creates a poem, but you asked it to create a poem, and gave it the parameters to create said poem, who owns the copyright? What if it only assisted you in creating an application, it didn’t write all the code, just some of the code? Who owns that? Also, when we train AI on certain data, but that data has specific licensing, then the AI creates code that is not licensed in the same way, has the created code broken the license agreement? There was a fascinating discussion during the Q&A, and it definitely has me thinking about such systems in a very new way.

Magda being amazing!

The last talk that I saw at the conference was present by someone named Adam Berman, it was called “When is a Vulnerability Not a Vulnerability?”. For those of you who have followed me a long time, you would know that I wrote a blog post with that exact title in 2018 (read it here). My post was about when vulnerabilities are reported to bug bounty programs, but they are not exploitable/do not create business risk, is it really a vulnerability? In it I explored a ‘neutered’ SQL injection attack, and of all the posts I have ever written, it has received by far the most scrutiny.

That said, although there was a similar slant, it was definitely not based off of anything I have written or spoken on. Which made it extra-exciting for me!

Adam works at R2C (who make SemGrep), so all of the research came from them. In April of this year, I will be co-presenting a workshop at RSA with Clint Gibler (of R2C and TL;DR Sec fame) about ‘How to Add SAST to CI/CD, Without Losing Any Friends’ (no link available at this time). We will be using SemGrep to demo all the lessons, so I was extra-curious to see Adam speak!

Brian presenting SemGrep

Adam’s talk was all about traceability in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). A reoccurring issue that happens when you work in AppSec is developers not having enough time to fix everything we ask them to. We (AppSec folks) are constantly trying to persuade, pressure, demand, and even beg developers to fix the bugs we have reported. One of the most convincing ways to get a developer to fix a bug is by creating an exploit. But that is VERY time consuming! It’s not realistic for us to create a proof-of-concept exploit for every single result that our scanners pick up. Layer on top of this the fact that automated tools tend to report a LOT of false positives, and this leads many developers to question if they absolutely need to fix something, or if “maybe we can fix it until later”. And by “later” I mean “never”.

If you scan an application with an SCA tool, most of them will tell you if any of the dependencies in your application are ‘known to be vulnerable’. They do this by checking a list of things they know are vulnerable (they create this list in many ways, and Adam covered that, but that part is not the exciting part, you can learn that anywhere). Think of the SCA tool working like this: “Are you using Java Struts version 2.2? Yes? It’s vulnerable! I shall now report this to you as a vulnerability!” But just because the dependency has a vulnerability in it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you application is vulnerable, and here lies the problem.

More Brian!

If your application is not calling the function(s) that have the vulnerability in them, then your app shouldn’t be vulnerable (in most cases this is true, there are rare exceptions, specifically Log4J). Previously, SemGrep released a blog post about this (you can read it here), and they claim that approximately 98% of all results from SCA tools are false positives, because the vulnerable function within the dependency is never called from the scanned app. Which means there’s no risk to the business. Which means it’s a false positive. It’s still technical debt, which is not great, but it’s not a great big hole in your defenses, and that’s a very different (and much less scary) problem.

If you’ve been begging developers to update all sorts of dependencies, imagine if you reduced your number of asks by 98%? And you could show them where their app is calling the problematic function? That conversation would likely be a lot less difficult. In fact, I bet the developers would jump to fix it. Because it would be obvious that it’s a real risk to the business.

This is a BIG CLAIM, so I wanted to hear the details in person. And I did!

Moi

Because this was an OWASP event, Adam couldn’t just say “Yo, SemGrep is awesome, buy our stuff”. If he did that it also would also make for a not-very-entertaining-or-believable presentation. Instead, he explained HOW to do this yourself. And just how much work it is. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of work.

Although I would love to provide the technical details for you, I have to admit that I was almost falling asleep the entire time because of the “absolutely no sleep” situation from the night before with the crying baby. I must have yawned 100 times, and I was more-than-a-little concerned I may have offended the speaker! That said, I can’t give you the details, but I will post a link here as soon as I have it so you can watch Adam explain. He’s better at explaining it anyway!

Then I went to bed (at 4:00 pm, and I slept all the way until 5:00 am the next day!). After that I headed to the airport, flew home, and wrote this on the plane! I hope you enjoyed my summary of my experience at OWASP Global AppSec 2023, held in Dublin, Ireland, February 14th and 15th, 2023.

– fin –

Tanya on stage

Continuous Learning

Tanya Smiling

Working in the information technology (IT) field means you need to be comfortable with things at work constantly changing and the need to continue to learn as your career grows. Working in information security (InfoSec) means you not only need to keep up with all sorts of IT trends, but also the attacks, defenses, and mitigations for each. When I started learning about DevOps, and how they value continuous learning and ‘taking time to improve your daily work’, I was sold. But I wasn’t quite sure how to go about putting it into practice.

Tanya Janca, in British Columbia, Malahat

When I switched from being a software developer to a penetration tester, and then onto application security, I had a lot to learn. On top of that, I am dyslexic, so the more common ways that people learn don’t always work well for me. Even worse, my training budget for my job in the Canadian Public Service was $2,500 CAD a year (approximately $1900 USD) and I wasn’t allowed to travel for courses. Living in Ottawa, Canada at the time, there weren’t very many options that were within my reach.

I started out my security career switch with a professional mentor, but the first one didn’t work out very well. He got frustrated with me quickly, no matter how hard I tried. Although I found out later that his expectations were near-impossible to meet, and what was asked of me was not very reasonable (nor ethical at a times). Example: He asked me on a Friday to learn pentesting over the weekend, with no help or advice, and then told me to do my first pentest the following Monday, setting me loose on a client’s live production system, with zero previous experience. It did not end well. For me and the client. The mentor and I went our separate ways.

By this point I had started joining security communities. And I LOVED it. My favourite community of all the local ones I could find was OWASP, the Open Web Application Security Project. The Ottawa chapter was led by someone named Sherif Koussa, who I am proud to still call my friend and mentor today. I made friends quickly, found more than one new mentor, and even became a chapter leader. I learned a lot by inviting speakers, talking to others in the community, and volunteering for projects.

Eventually I started doing public speaking, which provided me with free tickets to conferences, and sometimes even free training! I also started my own OWASP project (OWASP DevSlop) so that I could learn how to secure software in a DevOps environment.

It became clear to me, very quickly, that I learn best by reading/listening/watching something, then trying it for myself, then teaching it to someone else. I also enjoy learning more when I follow this process, rather than only reading or watching videos. I realize this is way more work than just reading a book, but everyone is different. And I’m lucky because other people seem to like my style of teaching and writing, which motivates me in a way I had never previously known. 😀

Eventually I wrote my own book (Alice and Bob Learn Application Security), started my own tiny Canadian startup (We Hack Purple), and opened my own online academy and community.

But that’s what worked for me. You need to find what works for you.

Below is a long list of ways that you can use continue your learning. If you have more ideas, please send them to me and I will add them!

General Advice:

  • Find what you are interested in. Join communities (online and local, if possible) that focus on those topics. Make friends if you can!
  • Finding out what you are interested in might take a lot of time, that’s okay! It took me 2 years to figure out I wanted to do AppSec, not PenTesting. You need to find the right place for you.
  • If you fear that you are too old to learn, please put that notion aside. You CAN learn. If this belief is holding you back, talk to someone who cares about you, and let them talk you out of it. Everyone has doubts sometimes, people who love you can help you look past them.
  • Find out if there are learning opportunities at work. Sometimes you can job shadow someone or help on certain projects. I kept volunteering to help the security team at my office and eventually they let me join the team!
  • Some organizations offer coaching services to employees. Usually it’s for leadership, but I used to work somewhere as an AppSec coach. I trained up the junior people into AppSec pros; it was great!
  • If your office pays to bring in a trainer, it’s often significantly less costly than sending them all individually to courses. See if you can join forces with other teams, departments, or even other organizations to create a larger budget.
  • Ideally you will aim to learn about best practices that are agnostic in nature, and then also learn about your specific tech stack that you use at work. This could mean a general secure coding course, with a break-out session on your specific programming language, framework, cloud provider, etc.
  • If you are reading this and you are on the security team, and you are planning to train your developers on security for the first time, if anyone seems nervous, you might want to assure them all that no one is losing their job. It might sound strange, but sometimes when there’s change, people worry. If you can remove their worries, they will learn more, and hopefully maybe even enjoy it. Pay attention for this and reassure people if the need arises.
  • If you are planning learning for others, communicate your plan, in advance. Let them know what’s coming. It helps people prepare themselves, and you are likely to get better results.
  • If possible, provide training in multiple formats (audio, visual/diagrams/images, hands on, written, etc.) so that every person’s learning style is accommodated. If you’re not sure how you learn, try a few different ways and see which one “feels right”. That’s likely the best one for you!
  • Give yourself short breaks. A microbreak (5-15 seconds to laugh at a meme or read a few short posts on mastadon) can help you move the information from your short memory into long term memory, meaning you are more likely to be able to apply what you learned, and remember it for significantly longer.
  • Take tests or give yourself tests. Not so that you can see how you measure up against others, but to make yourself remember the things you’ve learned. Practising ‘recall’ will help ensure you’ve learned (not memorized) the new information.
  • Set a time aside for yourself each day and slowly watch recorded conference talks and other content that are of interest to you. Consuming information is smaller chunks can make it easier to absorb. If you aren’t sure which videos, books or articles that you want to start with, ask for suggestions from people in your community.
Tanya Janca, Presenting at B-Sides Ottawa, November 2022. Ottawa, Canada

Application Security Learning Opportunities:

I hope this helps you on your continuous learning journey!

Why can’t I get over log4j?

Image of Tanya Janca

I haven’t written in my personal blog in a while, and I have good reasons (I moved to a new city, the new place will be a farm, I restarted my international travel, something secret that I can’t announce yet, and also did I mention I was a bit busy?). But I still can’t get over log4j (see previous article 1, article 2, and the parody song). The sheer volume of work involved (one company estimated 100 weeks of work, completed over the course of 8 days of time) in the response was spectacular, and the damage caused is still unknown at this point. We will likely never know the true extend of the cost of this vulnerability. And this bugs me.

Photos make blog posts better. People have told me this, repeatedly. Here’s a photo, I look like this.

I met up last month with a bunch of CISOs and incident responders, to discuss the havoc that was this zero-day threat. What follows are stories, tales, facts and fictions, as well as some of my own observations. I know it’s not the perfect story telling experience you are used to here, bear with me, please.

Short rehash: log4j is a popular java library used for application logging. A vulnerability was discovered in it that allowed any user to paste a short string of characters into the address bar, and if vulnerable, the user would have remote code execution (RCE). No authentication to the system was required, making this the simplest attack of all time to gain the highest possible level of privilege on the victim’s system. In summary: very, very scary.

Most companies had no reason to believe they had been breached, yet they pulled together their entire security team and various other parts of their org to fight against this threat, together. I saw and heard about a lot of teamwork. Many people I spoke to told me they had their security budgets increased my multitudes, being able to hire several extra people and buy new tools. I was told “Never let a good disaster go to waste”, interesting….

I read several articles from various vendors claiming that they could have prevented log4j from happening in the first place, and for some of them it was true, though for many it was just marketing falsehoods. I find it disappointing that any org would publish an outright lie about the ability of their product, but unfortunately this is still common practice for some companies in our industry.

I happened to be on the front line at the time, doing a 3-month full time stint (while still running We Hack Purple). I had *just* deployed an SCA tool that confirmed for me that we were okay. Then I found another repo. And another. And another. In the end they were still safe, but finding out there had been 5 repos full of code, that I was unaware of as their AppSec Lead, made me more than a little uncomfortable, even if it was only my 4th week on the job.

I spoke to more than one individual who told me they didn’t have log4j vulnerabilities because the version they were using was SO OLD they had been spared, and still others who said none of their apps did any logging at all, and thus were also spared. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be bragging about that to anyone…

For the first time ever, I saw customers not only ask if vendors were vulnerable, but they asked “Which version of the patch did you apply?”, “What day did you patch?” and other very specific questions that I had never had to field before.

Some vendors responded very strongly, with Contrast Security giving away a surprise tool (https://www.contrastsecurity.com/security-influencers/instantly-inoculate-your-servers-against-log4j-with-new-open-source-tool ) to help people find log4j on servers. They could likely have charged a small fortune, but they did not. Hats off to them. I also heard of one org that was using the new Wiz.io, apparently it did a very fast inventory for them. I like hearing about good new tools in our industry.

I heard several vendors have their customers demand “Why didn’t you warn us about this? Why can’t your xyz tool prevent this?” when in fact their tool has nothing to do with libraries, and therefore it’s not at all in the scope of the tool. This tells me that customers were quite frightened. I mean, I certainly was….

Several organizations had their incident response process TESTED for the first time. Many of us realized there were improvements to make, especially when it comes to giving updates on the status of the event. Many people learned to improve their patching process. Or at least I hope they did.

Those that had WAF, RASP, or CNDs were able to throw up some fancy REGEX and block most requests. Not a perfect or elegant solution, but it saved quite a few company’s bacon and reduced the risk greatly.

I’ve harped on many clients and students before that if you can’t do quick updates to your apps, that it is a vulnerability in itself. Log4j proved this, as never before. I’m not generally an “I told you so” type of person. But I do want to tell every org “Please prioritize your ability to patch and upgrade frameworks quickly, this is ALWAYS important and valuable as a security activity. It is a worthy investment of your time.”

Again, I apologize for this blog post being a bit disjointed. I wasn’t sure how to string so many different thoughts and facts into the same article. I hope this was helpful.

Alice and Bob Learn: Chapter Discussions

At the end of each chapter of Alice and Bob Learn Application Security, there are questions for the reader to ponder. As the author, I will behold streaming sessions every 4 weeks to discuss the questions, starting March 20, 2021. If you would like invites to the streams, please sign up here.

All of the streams are free, and I would love to have you join us live! If you can’t make it live, you can watch them after on my YouTube Channel, or download them via a podcast app by looking for the podcast “Alice and Bob Learn” (which will be launched right after the first stream).

Ideally, you will read the chapter before the corresponding live discussion, but if you don’t, that’s okay. You will still learn, and you are definitely will welcome to attend. 😀

AMA: Where can we learn Threat Modelling?

In a recent ‘Ask Me Anything’ Tanya covers ‘Where can we learn Threat Modelling?’.

The linked video is approximately 2 minutes.

  • Threat modelling, for those who are unaware, is a sort of ‘evil brainstorming’.
  • The question included “How can we learn by doing, not just reading?”
  • Play the game “Escalation of Privilege”, create by Adam Shostack
  • You can actually play online, for free! It just came online last week. Play online here.
  • She also mentions that you should play Backdoors and Breaches, however, that is an incident response card game. You should still play it, but it won’t teach you threat modelling. 😀
  • Every time there is a new project at work, meet with them for one hour and just *try* to threat model. It’s okay if it’s not perfect, if you identify just one risk you had not thought of, your sessions was productive.
  • Every time someone else at work is doing a threat model, sit in and “job shadow” them. Learning by watching and participating is a fantastic way to get in the middle of things.
  • Non-hands-on activities: 1) watch the many videos on this topic by several experts in the area, Adam ShostackAvi DouglenTony UcedaVelezCaroline MoeckelTash Norris, the list goes on and on.
  • Whiteboard designs with people and then ‘put on your black hat’ and take a look.
  • Ask the tech team (developers, architects, ops peeps), ‘If you were going to hack your app, how would you do it?” The answers may terrify you, but you’ll be happy you asked.
  • Read Tanya Janca’s numerous articles on the topic: Hacking Robots and Eating SushiThreat Modelling Serverless, and Threat Modelling.
  • Then we get a bit off topic and start talking about Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions…
For this and more, check out my book, Alice and Bob Learn Application Security and my online training academy, We Hack Purple!

PS The Video Quality is low in this video and has been improved in future recordings.

For content like this and more, check out my book, Alice and Bob Learn Application Security and my online community, We Hack Purple!