OPINION: Why Does It Suck To Think Like A Good Guy In Security

Day after day, on social media and elsewhere on the Internet, there are lots of folks who are seemingly shocked every time a bad guy shows up and acts like a bad guy. Seriously, how many times have you read or seen "I can't believe Suspect A was able to murder all of those people" or "If only they (security) did XYZ like I thought of during a conversation with my veterinarian who may have been in the military, that bad thing wouldn't have happened"? I see it quite a bit and frankly, I've decided it may be time to finally add my .02 about it.

Those of us in security who have spent some time studying "the threat" (insert whatever scary bad guy you're dealing with) understand what few who haven't studied it don't. No matter how awesome your protective measures are, they do little to mitigate (and certainly not "prevent") the attacker unless you start thinking a bit like they do. Herein lies the fatal flaw of most "white hats" and even some "grey hats".

1. You think of attacks in ways that you would conduct them. No offense but if you're protecting yourself against robbers but know relatively little of them, you may be looking to deploy solutions which don't work against that threat. One of the most painful things any security professional can hear when doing a site survey with a client from the client is "If I were the bad guy, this is how I would do it." More often than not, it is not how the bad guys would attack. Think security cameras in homes. Most people will deploy a camera at home with the thought the camera provides an extra layer of protection when in fact it doesn't. I have known several victims of home invasions who either had cameras installed or had an alarm sign out front. These are two commonly deployed deterrence tools that we know don't work. Instead, focus on the problem as if the bad guy would ignore the deterrence measures (because he will because we have little proof he won't) and proceed with the attack and use things like cameras as after-incident mitigation tools to catch the perpetrator later.
2. You think of your threat as one-dimensional. Most good guys see their threat based on commonly accepted precepts of what the threat is and how he has attacked in the past. Just because the bad guy only hit you or the other guy using one vector doesn't mean he won't try something different later. A great example of this is 9/11. Prior to the second World Trade Center attack, there were common beliefs that terrorists were only capable of performing certain kinds of attacks. What no factored in was changing realistic threat capabilities. In other words, we assumed the threat wasn't evolutionary in his tactics. Seriously, who could've imagine having to protect a building against two near-simultaneous aircraft crashes? Perhaps we could have had we accepted the idea that as we change so does the threat.
3. You think the threat is omnipotent and omnipresent. It's easy to get caught up in the hype of a threat. I do it sometimes. This is a natural defense mechanism after an attack has occurred. Why? No one likes to have their vulnerabilities exposed. After every mass shooting or act of violence that makes the news, we assume every venue that is like the one that was attacked is also vulnerable and being selected as the "next" target for another perpetrator.
   
   I remember fondly working on 9/11 on a small Air Force base on a perimeter patrol. What I recall the most are the initial attitudes people had of al Qaeda. We believed this one attack displayed a level of sophistication unseen by them before on US soil could be replicated on a massive scale. Every Muslim, ignorantly, was assumed to be a sleeper agent waiting for cues from "Muslim HQ" to attack us wherever and however they chose. The months and years ahead showed how far from the truth that was. Imagine how many countless resources were expended before we realized the fallacy behind this assumption.
4. You think your attacker "chose" you for a variety of reasons he didn't. People almost always assume an attacker chose to attack them or others for reasons they didn't. Rape is commonly thought to be a crime of lust because good people believe sex is the only reason you rape because it's the end-result. However, most criminologists and psychologists would agree rape is a crime of power. I would argue the majority of crime takes place for this very reason. Terrorism occurs because of this as does murder (what's more powerful than ridding yourself of someone permanently), drug dealing, fraud, and a host of other crimes. You're either fighting to obtain it (i.e. steal it from someone else) or committing crime to become more powerful. This confusion could possibly explain why most crime "prevention" measures based on policy fail at alarming rates - we're clueless on what truly motivates people to attack us.
5. You assume because you haven't seen the threat, he must not exist. Whether we see the threat or not, we should never assume he does not exist. While the threat can't be everywhere every time, the threat can still be very much. Never assume the absence of threat means he or she isn't going to show. You still need to adequately protect your assets as if today is the day you're going to be attacked. Remember, the attacker chooses the time of attack. You choose how well-prepared you'll be when it happens.

I'm not proposing anyone go out and hire a red team. I firmly believe one of the reasons we, often, fail so miserably at security sometimes is due to our natural inclination to think the bad guy thinks like we do when they don't. So how can we fix this?

1. Study your adversary. Seriously, pour over any open source intelligence you can on your threat. Read the paper and look for crime stories. Pick up a police report or two on similar venues like yours. I'll leave how you conduct your research to you. Just do it. Stop assuming blindly how the attack will go down or even who your adversary is.
2. Consider hiring folks who can think like attackers. I'm not saying you hire criminals but red teams hire specialists who can mimic attackers. Choose folks from a variety of backgrounds to round out your security team. By the way, by "background", I'm not talking education. I mean pick a team with a variety of specialists.
3. Test your systems with exercises. The only way you're going to learn is by testing how well your security program holds up against an actual attack. Consider doing this with little to no notice and have an after-action or "hot-wash" debriefing with your red team and affected staff right away. Finally, fix the vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
4. Reward outside the box thinking. When I was a young boy, I recall my fondest memories were playing games like "hide-and-go-seek" with my friends. The guys who were the most creative were the best at this game. Why? Because they were unpredictable. I'll leave how you choose to reward these folks on your own. Just do it.

PHOTO: Fake Cameras Provide Fake Protection

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I run into stores that have decoy cameras in lieu of real cameras. I also can't tell you how many countless times these same stores get robbed. Buying a decoy camera, in my opinion, are invitations for criminals. This is not to say most criminals can't tell the difference between fake and real. This is to say that many of these businesses and homes that utilize decoy cameras don't quite get what kind of mitigators they need to adequately protect themselves and their assets.

The added statistic at the bottom of this photograph is especially troubling because it dupes customers into believing they have added another layer of "security". This is correct in some respects. Remember what I said about "security" being a goal and less of an action? The problem lies in exactly the same place issues of semantics in security are - it relies on data that is either incomplete and more than likely, irrelevant to their protection needs.

We all know cameras serve a variety of purposes other than video surveillance. We also understand some vendors and property owners either have poor tools or are so under-trained they may as well not have a camera. However, when an incident happens, the last thing property owners want to tell the police and insurance companies (worse yet, a jury in a civil liability trial) is they thought a decoy or non-operative camera offered better protection.

If you're a property owner and considering one of these decoys, turn around and invest in a camera system you will monitor and maintain. If you're a pro, call these out and the dangers behind using them.

The Semantics of Security - The Great Enabler of Security Ignorance

One of the toughest and most insightful lessons I learned came during a conversation with a good military buddy about why English is such a difficult language to learn. "You never mean the things you say. You say you "love" your car in Spanish, it means you love it like family. It's as if you use the words so much they lose their actual meaning." I was a bit taken aback by this. No one had ever explained the issue of semantics so eloquently before to me.

This same thing happens in security and explains what makes it so difficult for so many professionals and lay-people to be able to comprehend it. The following are great examples:

1. Prevention versus mitigation. Prevention is defined by Websters as "the action of stopping something from happening or arising." Mitigation is defined by Websters as "the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something." The words mean something completely different from the other, yet are used interchangeably. In security, getting these two words wrong can mean the difference between a loss of life (yours or an innocent) and victory over an attacker. Having lofty goals of prevention through methods and measures seldom tested with actual bad actors, often leads to failure when they do show up. However, having sound mitigators in place should they attack, could save both life and property and result in the consequential capture of your bad actor. The decision to stop his or her actions is totally dependent upon his or her decisions and plans before and during the attack. Your measures could help persuade them not to attack but I would hardly call this prevention without more quantifiable evidence.
2. Vulnerability assessment versus reconnaissance. A vulnerability assessment is a process which entails analyzing a client's assets to determine likely avenues of approach for attackers. It could involve talking to stakeholders, physical walkthroughs of the assets, imagery analysis, and red-team exercises. Reconnaissance is a process which entails some covert surveillance resulting in a report to the target's adversary to support a plan of attack on the target. These terms are often confused because people assume one means the other. Typically, bad actors do recon and friendly agents do vulnerability assessments. The latter could use the former as part of a red-team exercise or even as part of a walkthrough. However, the methods by which either is done are very different. Keeping this in mind prevents amateurs from thinking by doing reconnaissance, they are in some way doing a complete vulnerability assessment.
3. Security versus protection. It grates my nerves to hear people say they are "doing security". I find most people have no true understanding of what the term means and are therefore, ill-suited for and failing miserable at the task they think they are doing. As I've discussed before, security is a mental construct wherein our protective measures are adequate enough in our minds to mitigate bad actors and their attacks to make us feel secure. It's a subjective term but more of a goal and less of an action than anything else. Protection is what we do to make the environment secure enough to assuage our fears of a possible attack.
4. Arrested versus detained. It took me a while to get used to this. They both sound like they should mean the same thing but they do not. Ask anyone who has ever been arrested. Being arrested has an element of detention but it isn't the totality of the action. You can be detained without being arrested. While this may sound like an issue of semantics, ask your legal counsel to explain what happens in security when you confuse your ability to detain versus your arrest powers.
5. OPSEC. OPSEC is one of the latest buzzwords to come into the modern security lexicon. Everyone believes they do it but few actually do to include me at times. Seriously, everyone on social media who is in our industry seems to have a burner cell phone number, 10 fake IDs, wall safes for their wall safes for the wall safes with their encrypted USB, uses TOR to hide from the NSA (as if), etc. The first rule of being good at operations security is to shut up about OPSEC. What's the first thing people do when they think they've done something awesome with respect to OPSEC? They tweet about it on a source they don't own with people they don't know or could vet with any realistic degree of certainty, using communication they know very little about on the Internet which was created by some of their adversaries who have actively engaged in intelligence operations here since its inception. So if so few get it, why do they think they've adequately protected themselves? See the difference between prevention and mitigation.
6. Intelligence versus information. I often hear professionals claim they have "intelligence" on adversary, when in fact they don't. Most often they have only raw information they haven't vetted or analyzed. These colleagues suffer from the correlation paradigm where they mistakenly conclude correlating or parallel information to an event is the cause. In the analyst world, this is called "confirmation bias". You believe the information because it confirms what you believe. Intelligence is the product of taking that raw information, vetting its source, comparing and contrasting that data against previous data and assumptions, peer reviews, and a final reporting of that information with an analysis centered on critical thinking. A newspaper article in and of itself is not intelligence because it says something we already thought was true. That would be akin to treating Weekly World News' stories on aliens consulting a still-alive JFK on Elvis' newly proposed welcome-back world tour as intelligence because you're an Elvis-loving, conspiracy theorist who believes you're an alien-abductee.
   
   
7. Guard versus officer. I'm sure to stir up something here. Let me clarify: there is NOTHING wrong with being a "guard". However, traditionally, that word has gotten a bad reputation. Think "mall security guard". These guys can be awesome professionals but the title does tend to minimize the extraordinary amount of work it takes to protect the thousands of mall patrons and mall assets against a variety of threats daily. It also does little to note the authority which enables them to perform certain legal actions against those threats such as trespass advisements and in some cases, arrests. "Officer" denotes they are an extension management and not merely someone who stands a post. They represent the extent to which managers are willing to go to protect their assets and their customers.
   
   Recently, during a discussion with another friend from the military, I recalled a conversation about semantics with a person who worked in what was commonly referred to as the "chow hall". One day, I inquired why the name "chow hall" was such an insult to him. He explained "Do you guard planes or do you protect assets vital to national security? I don't cook chow. I cook meals which are nutritious as per my training. We're both professionals. I know people mean no harm but that term implies my food and what I do as a professional are sub-par and unworthy of a professional title, when that's not true." Vets, I hear the snickering. Stop laughing. But he had a point. One that wasn't lost on me.
   
   How your customers see a "guard":
   
   
   
   An image the term "security officer" typically conveys:
   
   
8. OSINT versus unclassified. I'm a huge supporter of open source intelligence (OSINT). This entails gathering intelligence from a variety of non-covert channels. This could include public radio, news broadcasts, social media, etc. I have noticed this word used to excuse what I believe to be gross violations of protecting classified or sensitive information. Let me explain. I certainly understand OSINT by its nature can come from unclassified channels. However, I also realize it does not negate professionals from their responsibility not to divulge information coupled with their "insider perspective" which may be tactically advantageous to an adversary. You can observe this lack of professionalism best on social media, during a critical incident. There's seems to be a pandemic of sorts when these incidents happen which encourages its victims to feed their egos by talking endlessly about their highly sensitive "insider knowledge". I, once, observed someone who is widely considered an "expert" tweet the locations of responding forces to a major hostage situation. Another person tweeted security measures at a base they just left. Sure, none of this was classified because it came from a radio scanner and personal experience. It was, nonetheless, highly sensitive and could have placed lives at risk, if the adversary had intercepted these messages. In the physical security, once sensitive information is compromised, we only have a precious, small amount of time to deploy mitigators. As I'm often say during these events, "Don't let your ego and mouth write checks your a-- can't afford to cash with someone else's collateral."
   
   

   We've moved a table to barricade the door into this room. pic.twitter.com/FXj33EynxE
   — Federico Barillas S. (@fgbarillas) October 3, 2013

9. Active shooter versus mass killing. The best way to explain this is simply stating not every active shooter kills anyone and not every mass killing involves a gun. Yet, whether because of politics or hype, professionals and laymen still confuse these two. This may seem meaningless until you realize how information is gathered to study these two distinct events and the influence those studies have on policy.
   
10. Security theater versus threat mitigation. Look, folks, as professionals, we realize not every threat is going to attack us. We also get some of our measures are extreme. I'm certainly NOT trying to justify any abuses of authority or trust. That being said, just because you don't see the "boogey-man" doesn't mean he's not there. Does this mean security should have authority to do cavity searches on everyone? No. But it doesn't mean because that's extreme that someone isn't trying to do you harm. Do some threats get blown out of proportion? You bet. A vigilant public and other professionals are awesome checks against overreach, though. As every threat isn't realistic, every threat mitigator isn't security theater. We'd all do well keeping this in mind.

There are a load of others I would add but I feel as though this list does a great job of illustrating the power of words in our industry. Please use them carefully. If you have more, let me know.