[Music]
unless we are able to tell our stories
does our work actually occur i'll leave
you with that uh that postulation will
we uh kick you off take it away frank
all right over the next 10 minutes i'm
going to be talking about the importance
of telling stories
uh and so realistically the the title
says it all
um so i think we're done thanks for
coming bye-bye
okay okay maybe maybe not quite
um first a little about me
in case you didn't see yesterday and
i spent several years doing digital
forensics and incident response
consulting
where i got to talk to lawyers a lot i
moved from there to corporate
in financial services i ran our security
operations team
for several years i got to talk to
lawyers
a lot i got to talk to business leaders
c-level
hr and and now i'm with red canary and i
lead our search
training program so from past experience
trying to explain technical concepts to
non-technical people
a lot of that translates over into my
current role
where i also get to work with sales
staff and
others that are in non-technical or
different type of technical
roles to help them understand how our
detection process
works and believe it or not this
often involves telling stories
okay so what uh what
happens when you take a bunch of
as our our cert vp
affectionately says naval gazers right
and and he's one of us so he gets to say
that
um but what happens when you get a bunch
of us together in a room
and then the answer is pretty much
nothing
i mean if we know somebody in the room
we may go talk to them
and if enough of us know the same person
or you know some of the same people an
actual conversation may occur
with with many people but that's when
we're with our tribe
right what do we do when we want to
share information with others
and how about others that are not our
tribe
others who are not technical like
lawyers like business leaders what do we
do
in those types of situations
now it's probably not etymologically
sound
but i've been told that there's a reason
that history
has story in it
using stories to share information
occurrences
and relate to one another as humans
has been a core part of every culture
throughout
well history
and this is certainly anthropologically
sound
there i've i've gotten my quota of big
words out of the way for today
but we've we've drifted away from this
concept of
of storytelling to focus more on
science with stats with numbers with
methods
and and process rather than
relationships is
king and history
has become a dull and boring textbook
now nigel tranter who i list
here uh is a scottish author
he mostly historical novels but
but just novelizing history right not
not not uh novels from a standpoint of
fiction but from making history
interesting making it passionate making
it exciting rather than dry and boring
he really felt like that was important
history is the story of our lives of
nations and it's something to be
experienced
something to be felt
and with that we're going to go back
in time to highlight a couple of talks
from the
sands d for summit of 2017.
now i was there at the summit in person
um i'm one of the people that kind of
got mentioned earlier i guess that like
i'm always there right
that's that's the the conference that i
live
to go to every year and i have about 150
lines of notes
from that two-day conference uh fred
kaplan gave the keynote
about dark territory it was really
incredible
some amazing research was shared and
i'm either using or have used tools that
were presented about
there but those aren't the things that
stood out to me
right we're now three years later
and there's two talks that i still
remember
uh one jessica hyde and brian moran gave
a talk called
amazon alexa are you skynet and tim ball
gave a talk called
the forensics of plagiarism a case study
in cheating
i want to showcase these because they
used elements of storytelling
and as a result they've stuck with me
more than any other talk at that
conference
starting off brian and jessica had a
theme
and for the the sharp eyes there you see
lee whitfield lurking in the background
grinning kind of maniacally
perhaps anyway um
i know these people right they're part
of my tribe
brian and jessica are very high energy
engaging speakers they're popular within
the community
and they're well known and well liked by
many
either one on their own gives a great
talk
together it's a thing of legends
but this talk
wasn't very much for me
right i don't mean that in a negative
way it was just
the the topic of it it was not that
applicable
uh for my line of work for the the type
of research that i do
um so it from that perspective it wasn't
that much of an interest although it did
do more to convince me that i don't want
iot in my home but
brian told a story
and i think this picture says it all
right
most people sit on a couch brian
apparently stands on the couch
on the back of the couch to turn off a
light
and and this was early on in the
presentation right this kind of set the
stage for everything else
now as it as it turns out that
aforementioned light was his
impetus for going iot
apparently it was over a stairwell over
a drop to impending doom
and and maybe that doesn't sound like a
huge deal but as brian noted in the talk
he was concerned about a scenario
in which he might have consumed too much
alcohol
put on a horse head mask and an adult
lego unikitty onesie
and climbed up on the couch to turn off
the light
okay maybe i added the mask and the
onesie for effect
but if you know brian you know it's not
entirely out of the question
the point is that light is what got him
started on the path and once he was
putting in smart bulbs he wanted to
figure out what information might be
collected
stored potentially exposed by the
controlling applications
and that led to collaboration and
research that was shared in this talk
and i remember that even though note
like i said
this talk the topic wasn't
a thing for me it wasn't an interesting
thing
but him sharing that story
is what made it memorable even years
later
now this is the title slide from the
the next example and as you can see it
looks
nothing like the previous one for one
thing there's
no liquid field this has the look
and feel of a white paper
right now i don't know tim ball
well i didn't know him at all prior to
the conference
he's not someone that i'd ever met or
come across because you know like i've
met and come across everybody in the
world
right um and i say that just to point
out that i
didn't already have you know that that
affiliation that affinity for him is for
jessica and brian
his speaking style was very different it
was much more serious
straightforward perhaps even dry a
little bit at least in comparison
and maybe that's to be expected you know
since he was a
college professor although it turns out
he hadn't been in academia very long
at that time
tim said that one thing he'd learned in
his short time at that point
teaching college was that cheating was
rather common
now that's that's pretty disappointing
but i guess it stands to reason
people look for the easy way out
anyway he told a story about
a student an actual student real
you know real life scenario
in a computer forensics class that's
right
a computer forensics class that got
that cheated and got caught
as it turns out colleges universities
they have ways to catch this type of
thing and using a forensic approach
kim was able to prove the activity the
student tried to fight it
even got parents involved but with no
joy
and so just as with the alexa talk it
told a story
that helped relate to other humans and
through that story it shared information
and built connections
and became memorable not necessarily
because of the content
or the topic but because of the story
so what can you do if you're one of the
naval gazers
you're not comfortable speaking in front
of others especially
those outside your tribe
think about ways that you can share
information in a story format
instead of trying to just present dry
facts
create a storyline in which those facts
are key
show it to your audience whether that's
other geeks
business leaders lawyers or non-work
friends who typically just
glaze over when you start to talk about
your day
it's it's about the experience of life
and we can
all share that i think it was um
jim's talk yesterday
he talked about his story of try try
again
with this one malware sample right
that's the kind of thing that we're
talking about
you can share a story it doesn't have to
be perfect
you don't have to have all the answers
but it's the experience
and it's relating that experience to
other people
it becomes important the more you do it
the better you get at it all right so
reference links
um you know for for some of the stuff
here
pointing back to the sans archive and
whatnot um
and just a little article that i thought
was interesting about storytelling and
kind of the importance to
society on that and
that's it so thank you all very much and
i hope you enjoyed it
you