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Successful Software Security Training Lessons Learned

How enterprises build, deploy and manage software apps and applications has been turned upside down in recent years. So too have long-held notions of who is a developer. Today, virtually anyone in an organization can become a developer—from traditional developers to quality assurance personnel to site reliability engineers. 

Moreover, this trend includes an increasing number of traditional business workers, thanks to new low-code and so-called no-code development platforms. These platforms are making it possible for these non-traditional developers, sometimes called citizen developers, to build more apps the enterprise needs. Of course, whenever an organization has someone new developing code, it creates a situation that could potentially create new security, privacy and regulatory compliance risks. 

For most organizations, this means they must reconsider how they conduct security awareness and application security testing. Recently, at Code42, we trained our entire team, including anyone who works with customer data. This comprised of the research and development team, quality assurance, cloud operations, side reliability engineers, product developers and others to ensure everyone was using best practices to secure our production code and environments. 

We knew we needed to be innovative with this training. We couldn’t take everyone and put them in a formal classroom environment for 40 hours. This isn’t the best format for many technologists to learn.

Instead, we selected a capture the flag (CTF) event. We organized into teams who would be presented with a number of puzzles designed to demonstrate common vulnerability mistakes, such as those in the OWASP Top 10. We wanted to create an engaging hands-on event where everyone could learn new concepts around authentication, encryption management and other practices. 

We had to create content that would challenge and yet be appropriate and interesting for everyone, including the engineers. It wasn’t easy considering each of the teams use different tools and languages and have skillsets that vary widely. Watching the teams work through the CTF was fascinating because you could see their decision-making processes when it came to remediating the issues presented. For problems where a team wasn’t sure of the solution, we provided support training materials, including videos.

While the event was a success overall, we certainly learned quite a bit that will create a better experience for everyone in our next training. 

Let me say, the CTF style was exceptional. The approach enabled individuals to choose areas they needed to learn, and the instructional videos were well received by those who used them. But I’ll tell you, not everyone was happy. About three-quarters of my team loved it, and then the other quarter wanted to grab pitchforks and spears and chase me down.

First, throughout the contest, a lack of a common development language proved to be a challenge. Within most of the teams, the engineers chose the problems that were in a language with which they were familiar. It often cut the quality assurance or site reliability engineers out from helping on that problem. No good.

Gamification, while well intended, caused problems.  As I mentioned, we had instructional videos. That way, if a team didn’t know the answer to a problem, they could watch the videos, get guidance, and learn in the process. This added a time element to the project, which actually caused individuals to skip the videos.

How we implemented the leaderboards proved counterproductive. Remember how we all (well, many of us) feared being the last person picked in gym class growing up?  Well, leaderboards shouldn’t be present until the game ends, and even then to summarize only the top finishers. No one likes to know they were in the bottom 10 percent, and it doesn’t help the learning process.

Dispel the fear. These are training and awareness classes. While official and credited security training is often a pass/fail outcome, this awareness training is for education. However, our employees feared their performance would somehow be viewed as bad and could affect their performance reviews—or employment. Face these rumors up front and make it clear the CTF results aren’t tied to work performance.  

Overall, our team did learn valuable lessons using our CTF format — the innovative approach we took to educate them was successful in that way. But next time I hold a contest, we will definitely incorporate changes from the lessons above. And I’ll work harder to strike the balance between formal lecture and class setting versus competitive event when there are developers that present with varying experience and skillsets.

  

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