Peter Drucker said “What gets measured, gets managed”. When I turned up at Old Trafford, home of Manchester’s red team (it’s a security conference, geddit) for The Future of Cyber, I certainly was measurably impressed by the setting even though I’m usually found more on the blue spectrum of infosec. But let’s get into the talks! Measure, measure, measure First, Greg Notch talked about the importance of using metrics in communication.

About two months ago I stumbled across a great YouTube video of a talk by Charity Majors called Compliance standards should be modern development practices. Now let’s step back for a minute. Am I seriously suggesting that anything with the word “compliance” is going to be a riveting watch? Why, yes I am. And with good reason. I’m a fan of good security and I like agile. And I think one of the major stumbling blocks about putting Sec into DevOps is to forget the agile origins of DevOps culture.

Last year was exciting, it was my first time going to a DevOps Enterprise Summit and meeting Gene Kim was very cool. The conference didn’t actually start on Tuesday, there was a little session on Monday as people were trickling in from all over the world. And in said session, Gene presented his latest project. He was writing a book with Steven Spears called Wiring the Winning Organisation. If I’m honest, I am not a fan of the title.

After the glimmer of hope on day 3 I was quite optimistic for the day 4 puzzle. I kept going with the phind-codellama model. I continued with keeping the model on a fairly tight leash and just being very specific as to what I wanted it to do. What’s the puzzle? So, for the first part, we had to parse a text file and then match up numbers and winning numbers.

My experimentation with LLMs on day 1 and day 2 of Advent of Code was a bit frustrating. For the day 3 puzzle, I decided to change model. Previously I had been using the codellama:13b model but wasn’t really happy. I kept arguing with it and it just frustrated me. So let’s try some others. codellama:34b So I thought maybe the model just wasn’t big enough, so off we went

After day 1 of Advent of Code was only partially successful, I thought I would change my approach. Yesterday I tried to get the LLM to develop the whole solution in one go. But that was more like argumentative programming rather than conversational programming, so for the day 2 puzzle I start with small problems and hope to put it all together at the end. Let’s get started The problem looked quite straightforward, parse something like the following

So it is that time of the year again. Advent of Code is back. Yey! This means I get to try to look at a new language again. This time, why not Kotlin? But as an extra challenge, I thought why not see how the vaunted LLMs would help. Is AI really the accelerator that would elevate a mere developer to a rockstar ninja (whatever that is)? I have to add that I am a bit of an AI sceptic and keep saying that

I describe myself as an Agile Fundamentalist because I really like the ideas of the Agile manifesto, and I also confidently state that I am an AppSec snooper, because in my day job I tend to look at other people’s code, logs and systems and break them. I happen to think that agile and application security go together rather well! I had two different Slack conversations recently. One was on the UK cross-governmental #security Slack channel and the other one was on the Equal Experts #securit-ee Slack channel (yes I’m a consultant, and our Slack channels have hilariously got ee in their names).

After BSides Lancs and Leeds, Newcastle was my third BSides, both of the year and ever. I got up early in the morning for a road trip from Preston to Newcastle, and setting off at 5:30 on Saturday turned out to be atmospheric and straightforward. So I was a bit early and got a glimpse of the chaos that is putting together a BSides. Later I found out that BSides Newcastle was traditionally more chaotic than some of the other BSides.

As I stare at my laptop after an intense few days at 44CON, I reflect on the experience. I went through a lot of different emotions. Excitement, trepidation, relief, bewilderment, pride, disappointment and hope had accompanied my visit to London to 44CON. We had an OSINT Capture The Flag competition happen right next to a round-table discussion on how the government should secure the country. Looking from outside in, a rallying cry of “Hack the Planet” (if you want to feel old, it turned 28 during the con) side-by-side with the establishment might not be the first thing to expect at a security conference.