Incite 7/10/2012: Freedom
Last week we celebrated Independence Day in the US. It’s a day when we reflect on the struggles of our forefathers establishing the country, the sacrifices of the Revolutionary War, and what Freedom means to us all. Actually, most folks gorge on BBQ, drink a ton of beer, and light fireworks imported from China. Which I guess is another interpretation of freedom. I thought it would be great for each of us Securosis guys to describe what Freedom means to us for last week’s Incite. Alas, the best laid plans got derailed when it got to be late on Tuesday and I wanted to start my holiday. No Incite for you. Adrian put everything in context by remarking, “You are free not to do it.” Nice. But here’s the deal – I take freedom for granted, and if you live in a free society, you probably do too. I don’t think about the struggles involved in maintaining a free society. A couple times a year (you know, Memorial Day), I remember the brave military folks away from their families making sure my biggest issue is which Starbucks I choose to write at that day. The Boss and I try to impress upon the kids how lucky they are to live in a free environment. They learn about the Holocaust to see the worst in people. They’ll also read and hear about other oppressive regimes, and be thankful for where they were born. But if I’m being honest with myself, I haven’t felt free for most of my life. A conversation I had recently with Mike Dahn reinforced that. I was captive to my own expectations. Regardless of the fact that I could do anything (besides break the law, I guess), I always felt a responsibility to do what was expected of me. I compared myself to some vision of what I should be. What I should achieve. But that vision was only in my head. It wasn’t like my folks told me what to do. All those expectations made me feel like a failure, even though I achieved quite a lot. That epiphany became the impetus for my Happyness talk. I wasn’t until I let go of those self-inflicted expectations that I’ve been able to make strides toward being happy. Of course, I have good days and not so good days, like everyone else. But tossing my own expectations has given me the freedom to live my life – not anyone else’s. Not setting specific goals means I can enjoy the journey, not fixate on how far I have left to go. The US celebrates Independence once a year. But I get to celebrate my own Independence every day. And I don’t plan on taking it for granted. –Mike Photo credits: Independence, Oregon originally uploaded by Doug Kerr Incite 4 U It’s not the message, it’s how you say it: Sometimes you read something that hits very close to home. Bejtlich’s perspective on the importance of how you deliver the message resonated. The Boss chides me all the time about the fact that no matter what I’m saying, the kids shut down because I’m barking at them. “But they don’t listen! I need to get their attention,” I respond. And she just laughs. No matter what I say, they only hear more yelling. So when Rob Westervelt said a panel at an April security conference got contentious, clearly the folks in the audience didn’t get the message. It’s not that any of the panelists were wrong, but if you don’t package the message in a way that will get through to the other party, there is no wrong or right. Only wrong. So keep that in mind next time you present to business folks or chastise a user for doing something stupid. – MR The cloud is down. No it isn’t. Yes it is: Last week there was another cloudastrophe when Amazon AWS had an outage in their main US data center. The root cause was a combination of weather and a failure in their emergency power procedures. I don’t overly blame them, since it’s really hard to effectively test every scenario like that. But it’s a reminder that not only can the cloud go down, but it can be difficult to architect availability for such a complex system. Extremely difficult, as Netflix shared in a killer post discussing why they went down. Now, for the record, this was a major personal disaster because my 3 year old couldn’t watch “the Apple TV” (which also had a “rough morning” Tuesday due to low bandwidth). This isn’t a security failure but it does highlight the complexity of fully moving to cloud and how that impacts fundamental design and DR/BC scenario planning. Security is no different than availability and we are all going to learn some of these lessons together the hard way. – RM No access, no problem: Brandon Williams asks how do we arm small and medium businesses (SMB) for the change in threat landscape with the switch to EMV cards? His premise is that if the EMV credit card format comes to the US, we expect to see a shift from “card present” to “card not present” (i.e., Internet sales) fraud, mirroring the trend in Europe. The cards are harder to forge, the terminals perform some validation, and the infrastructure supports real point to point encryption instead of the mockery we’ve seen for the last decade or so. But does that mean SMB is at a disadvantage? I don’t think that’s the case. The terminals are expensive, but SMBs have lower overall switching costs to EMV. By combining it with tokenization, they have removed sensitive data from their environments, and pushed much of the liability back on payment processors by not being privy to payment data. Logically there is little difference between an Internet sale and an EMV transaction – payment gateways offer plug-ins and edge tokenization services perform equivalently to EMV without a card reader. As the merchant
