Sometimes life sneaks up on you.
Often when I am introduced to new clients and professional contacts, it is as “Analyst and CEO of Securosis; he used to be at Gartner”. I am fully cognizant of the fact that not only is Gartner where I started my analyst career, but also that my time and title there are the reason I was able to start Securosis. Not only did I learn how to be an analyst, but the Gartner name (as much as it pains some people) still carries a lot of weight. Leaving as a VP carries…
It starts with a blank slate. Not entirely blank because some stuff has happened over the past few months, which offers hints to where things will go. But you largely ignore that data because you want to believe. Maybe this time will be different. Or maybe it will be the same. All you can see is potential. Yet soon enough the delusions of grandeur will be shown to be exactly that – delusions.
If you are the head of communications for a big company and one of your executives goes off-script and says something … ill advised … and puts the foot in the mouth, what can you do? You curse the gods for putting you in that job and you long for the days when someone else was in the hot seat, when you have to go into damage control.
As you are likely out of the office much of today, preparing for a long weekend, I will keep this week’s summary short and to the point. Another three-star set of nits to pick.
Wendy (again) states things that we should already know in such an easy to understand way, that you smack yourself upside the head and wonder why you didn’t think of it. Her post on the 451 blog about The hierarchy of IT needs makes very very clear why you continue to have problems making the case for security in your organization.
The first couple weeks when the kids are back in school can be a little rough. We don’t have the routine down so there is some inevitable confusion and miscommunication. There are just so many details. Who is picking up which kid, from where? We drive that carpool which night? What is the address of the 3rd kid to grab for LAX practice? You know, that kind of thing.
Many folks have strong opinions about the right way to perform breach notification. More to the point, many folks think they know what not to do. But that’s okay – the great thing about opinions is that everyone gets their own. Recently the UPS Store, a franchised chain of shipping stores, reported a breach.
A few days after returning from DEF CON my family experienced an inevitable life-changing event you cannot really prepare for.
So I am finally home for a few weeks, coinciding with the kids starting school. As usual I grab my messenger bag first thing in the am and head out on my nomadic journey. With about 10 local Starbucks with Google WiFi, I am typically in one of those. I get faster Internet at Starbucks than I do at home (57mbps down FTW). It does make me a little more predictable, so that’s a bit alarming. But I’ll trade 50mb downloads for the anemic DSL speeds of AT&T WiFi every day of the week.
Everyone wants to be special. When I’m chatting with a company that doesn’t fit the typical profile for a state-sponsored attacker target, sometimes they seem disappointed. I certainly don’t mean to hurt their self-esteem, but the reality is that most businesses just don’t have anything of interest to a nation state.