Leap of faith: Changing careers to win the battle against cyber threats
- Details
- Written by Jeff Ishii
At MPOWER 2019, McAfee’s annual cybersecurity summit, I had the opportunity to interview Bill Woods, Senior Director Security Intelligence. His career has taken him from assault pilot, to FBI Special Agent in Charge, and finally to leading McAfee’s world-wide security operations. Bill’s journey is a case-study into how seemingly unconnected professions can lead to extraordinary results for organizations struggling with the onslaught of cyber threats.
Q. Bill, you’ve had an interesting career path. Tell me how your background helped you transition to running the security operations for a world leading cybersecurity company?
At the FBI, we were focussed on preventing bad things from happening. We had to be both pro-active and reactive in order to effectively respond to threats to the public and to the government. This aligned quite nicely with the McAfee’s Pledge to protect the world from cyber threats.
I also had a lot of experience with the intelligence cycle while I was section chief. This cycle combines processes that plan, collect, process, analyze, and disseminate critical information related to law enforcement. This same process is used in cybersecurity when performing both intelligence and response activities. From that perspective, my background helped me to guide teams responsible for threat hunting and cybersecurity incident response.
Finally, my government background instilled the need for a continuity of operations plan. At McAfee, we have two security operations centers located on different continents to service our world-wide operations. These centers provide total redundancy to ensure operations continuity in the event of a disruption.
Q. There are new cyber threats emerging every day. What keeps you up at night and what are you doing to help you sleep better?
We have very robust security technologies at our perimeter that prevents the bad guys from getting access to us. We are also very serious about our security awareness for employees and are constantly training them to strengthen our culture of security. What keeps me up at night is the threat from insiders.
Statistically, insider leaks are more devastating than the threats from the outside. An insider has intimate knowledge of the environment. They know how to take down key systems and they know where the crown jewels of the corporation are kept.
To mitigate this threat, we interviewed every executive in the organization, from the VP on up, and had them tell us what their critical technology assets were. We then configured our products to classify those assets, monitor them, and block their mis-use. We have many offerings that helped us to do this, like our data loss prevention (DLP) technology. DLP is one of the things that helps me to sleep better at night.
Q. The struggle between Information Security and IT seems to be a never-ending battle within organizations. How are you dealing with that conflict at McAfee?
The goal of InfoSec is to protect company data, while the goal of IT is to make things pleasant and productive for end-users. This creates a difference in mindsets between the two organizations. At InfoSec, we prefer a rule of least privilege for our digital assets, and as a result, our default access is set to “no”. On the other hand, IT wants to make things easy, so they lean towards setting their defaults to “yes”. My belief is that security is a balance between taking calculated risks versus locking everything down.
My experience as an assault pilot helped me in this regard. I was responsible for a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment. If the value of the asset was the only thing taken into account, then you’d never use it, but you have to fly the jet at some point.
To resolve the conflict, we regularly bring InfoSec and IT together for team building and joint education. This helps to understand our respective priorities and to agree on joint objectives. For example, the remote desktop protocol (RDP) is fantastic for IT because it helps them to efficiently support a distributed workforce, but for security it’s a nightmare because it is responsible for many ransomware exploits. Once we understood this, we jointly agreed on standards for the configuration and use of RDP. When it is required, IT can open up the RDP ports and use the remote desktop, but they have to close it down when done. On our end, we continuously scan the environment for open RDP ports, so we can take appropriate action if they are left open. This compromise is one area that helps us to work together instead of being adversarial.
Q. What has been the most rewarding aspect of your move to McAfee?
When I was looking for a career change, I wanted to do something that would make me proud of my work. The most rewarding thing about my time at McAfee has been working with employees who are committed to protecting people, corporations, and governments from the threats of the digital world. We have made significant impacts in that regard and I am proud of the results that our customers have achieved by using our technologies.
Jeff Ishii is a senior technology executive with a wealth of experience in management consulting, professional services and IT operations delivery for Fortune 500 companies. He has been at the forefront of technology for the last 30 years by implementing creative solutions that have produced sustained business value.
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