Security doesn´t take vacation
Jul 20th, 2020 by Jesper Kråkhede
Following my previous post, a question for management: Who is responsible for your security in July?
In many companies the honest answer is ‘a consultant on call who has never seen our environment’ or ‘the summer intern’. Not because anyone decided it, but because everybody else is on vacation.
The attackers know this. So the four weeks when you have the least capacity are the four weeks when you are most likely to need it.
This isn´t about making people skip their vacation. People need to rest, and a tired security team makes mistakes. It´s about planning. Stagger the vacations so you always have someone who knows the environment. Make sure that person has the mandate to act, including shutting things down if needed, without waiting for a manager on a sailing boat. If you don´t have the people, buy a SOC service that runs all year round, and make sure they know who to call.
And treat security staff like the critical resource they are. Good people are hard to find and easy to lose. Pay them, train them and give them reasonable working conditions.
An empty office in July is a business decision. So is the security that comes with it.