As your organization's environment grows, the effort to properly secure it grows. Every new employee, networked machine, Internet-hosted SaaS solution, line of custom application code, and Smart Whatever increases your organization's attack surface.
If all infrastructure were 100% identical, the effort required to secure it would decrease as procedures and processes become more streamlined. This isn't true in the real world, however. The diversity in hosts, software, and services required in a real-world environment make the effort required to secure a network grow linearly with the complexity of that network.
We can take steps to reduce complexity of our networks, yet linear complexity growth is inevitable. With the shortage of security talent, that leaves organizations with the devil's bargain of curbing growth or accepting increased risks.
There is a third option: embracing DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering culture and applying their mindsets to security operations. By focusing on amplifying the impact of security expertise through customization and automation, we can overcome the cybersecurity skills gap and implement real defense at scale.
Dino Dai Zovi is the Co-Founder and CTO at Capsule8. Dino is also a regular speaker at information security conferences having presented his independent research at conferences around the world including DEF CON, Black Hat, and CanSecWest. He is a co-author of the books "The iOS Hacker's Handbook" (Wiley, 2012), "The Mac Hacker's Handbook" (Wiley, 2009) and "The Art of Software Security Testing" (Addison-Wesley, 2006). He is best known in the information security community for winning the first PWN2OWN contest at CanSecWest 2007.
Taha is a Principal Malware researcher at DarkMatter, where he is responsible for malware reverse engineering and building detection mechanisms for x86 and ARM platforms. He is also responsible for the research and development of a next generation malware real-time threat hunting platform.
Previously, Taha was a Senior Malware Researcher and reverse engineer at Fireeye where he uncovered LATENTBOT a highly obfuscated malware in 2015 and worked in different investigations including an epic Brazilian carding investigation in 2016.
Taha holds an MBA and an MSc in Computer Security from l'Ecole pour l'informatique et les techniques avancées in Paris, France. His research interests lie primarily in the fields of operating systems, and novel malware and exploitation techniques, malware hunting and threat intelligence.