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Incite 9/28/2011: Renewal

Mike Rothman September 28, 2011 1 Comment

Tonight at sundown the holiday of Rosh Hashanah starts, and Jewish folks all over the world will celebrate the coming of the year 5772. Or so the story goes. But I know better than to discuss politics or religion on the blog. You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe, and it’s all good. But the coming of a new year is a time for reflection and renewal. At least for me. As most of you know from my weekly rants, I have a lot of balls in the air. Starting a business, managing a family, and all the other things that make life in the 21st century pretty complicated. I also have specifically stopped setting goals and I’m working on trying to enjoy the journey without worrying too much about where it leads. I am working on not being limited by what my peer group considers success. And I can say I’m much happier for it. Notice I didn’t say happy – I said happier. One of my other challenges is actually celebrating accomplishment. I’m trying to rewire my cranium, but it’s hard. I still don’t celebrate enough. So over the next few days, as opposed to focusing on what I’m going to get done over the next 12 months with my head in the future, and then building a list of all the things I want to accomplish, I’m going to spend some quiet time remembering what I got done over the last year. Yes, it takes me a conscious effort to look in the rearview mirror. But I need to take some time to smell the roses, or something like that. I hate to say it (for fear of some weird karmic jinx), but it’s been a good year. The kids are doing great, the Boss is in a good place, and so am I. The business is growing nicely (thank you very much), our side projects look very promising (yes, we’ll be unveiling our research product next week), and I can’t speak for Rich and Adrian, but I really enjoy being part of Securosis. I’m excited about the coming year. Mostly because I’m not sure what will happen. I’ve got a bunch of pretty cool research projects lined up. Stuff I’m looking forward to learning about and documenting. I’ll be getting my fitness regimen back on track and my eating plan has me feeling pretty good. What’s not to be excited about? I’ll spend Thursday and Friday getting my fill of dogma (that goes with the territory), spending time with friends and family, and taking a step back to enjoy what I’ve done the past 12 months. Then I’ll be back at it on Monday, renewed and focused. There is a lot to do, and some of it will actually get done. As one of my mentors always said, “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” He was right, but he missed an important nuance of that idea. If you don’t stop and check out the scenery every couple of miles, you miss out on most of the fun. -Mike Photo credits: “Renewal” originally uploaded by Auntie P Incite 4 U It’s all about expectations: Failure to manage expectations leads to unhappiness and angst. I’ve probably only written that about a zillion times. Augusto hits this point again, and reminds us that if your control set depends on a perfect scenario, there is a giant FAIL in your future. We can’t depend on executives to be rational (not from a security perspective, anyway), nor can we depend on projects to actually get to the finish line. These are bad assumptions. His points are right on the money. “It’s not just “design for failure”. It’s design around failure. Your network is a mess and it will always be like that, deal with it.” Yup. I’m looking forward to part 2, where he deflates policy and standards stupidity. – MR Selling security is doing it wrong: I’ve been on a couple vendor calls already this week where I had to explain that if you sell security to security, you can only grow so far, so fast. The real customer is never security, but development, operations, and plain old employees and executives. Cloudflare is an example of a company doing this right. Do they have security? Sure… but they also have analytics and, heck, now they have wiped some of your IPv6 problems off the table. They don’t care if something is security or not, so long as it brings value to their customers and fits their message. It’s a heck of a story and I think we’ll see a lot more of this approach: security as a byproduct – especially in SMB. – RM Trust at your own risk: I have gotten a couple email requests in the last couple days with dodgy looking PDF files attached. Given the recent OS X trojan, sending me a PDF file makes you suspect. Which is kind of funny, if you think about it, what with it being a universal document format. Supposedly the threat is considered low risk, but it’s really hard to tell what else it leaves behind that might open avenues for future attacks. What has really been worrying me is the Trojan Flash Player. You need to be careful where you get upgrades, and hope the big trusted site you get software from has not been hacked. Supposedly OS X will only install trusted and signed objects, but I don’t think there is any protection from having a pop-up ask for your administrator credentials – all with a nifty flash logo. Be careful what you click on, and be even more careful when you enter administrator credentials. – AL Wait. What? Security folks are pessimists? Shimmy tries to get us to think a bit more positively about security. He thinks because we have reasonably assured employment and challenging jobs, we should be happy. You know, more half full, less half empty. What if your

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