Cyber Security Best Practices for Developers

Don Franke

Don Franke has received innovation awards, earned industry certifications, authored patents, published the book Cyber Security Basics, and taught for (ISC)².

Don Franke has worked in information technology for over 20 years. During this time, the roles he served include senior software developer, incident responder, cyber security analyst, and security architect. He has also been a member of several non-profit security organizations and is active in teaching and writing about various topics in cyber security. His career started before there was a readily available Internet. One of his first work-related memories is of huddling around a Windows 3.1 PC, struggling to get winsock.dll loaded correctly. This was especially challenging because there was no Internet or Google to search for answers. Once connectivity was established, however, the magical World Wide Web opened up, with all of its random, home-grown sites and blinking text. This was 1994. It was a time when people only cared about sharing information, without much concern about security. How times have changed. Don went on to provide technical support for the analog modems used to connect people to the Internet, and after a couple years started doing web development using Microsoft IIS version 1.0 and Apache httpd with CGI. He continued working as a software engineer, primarily focused on creating web applications and automating data collection from disparate sources. After doing this for several years, the friction he observed between software development and security became strong enough that he decided to deliberately veer his career path to information security. He went back to school to get a Master of Science in Information Systems, with an Infrastructure Assurance concentration. Ever since then, he has sought information security projects, and outside of work pursued opportunities to write, teach and help make the world a little more secure.