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Incite 12/3/2014: Winding Down

Mike Rothman December 3, 2014 1 Comment

As I sit in yet another hotel, banging out yet another Incite, overlooking yet another city that isn’t home, this is a good time to look back on 2014 because this is my last scheduled trip for this year. It has been an interesting year. At this point the highs this year feel higher, and the lows lower. There were periods when I felt sick from the whiplash of ups and downs. That’s how life is sometimes. Of course my mindfulness practice helps me handle the turbulence with grace, and likely without much external indication of the inner gyrations. But in 5 years how will I look back on 2014? I have no idea. I have tried not to worry about things like the far future. At that point, XX1 will be leaving for college, the twins will be driving, and I’ll probably have the same amount of gray hair. Sure, I will plan. But I won’t worry. I have been around long enough to know that my plans aren’t worth firing the synapses to devise them. In fact I don’t even write ‘plans’ down any more. It is now December, when most of us start to wind down the year, turning our attention to the next. We are no different at Securosis. For the next couple weeks we will push to close out projects that have to get done in 2014 and start working with folks on Q1 activities. Maybe we will even get to take some time off over the holidays. Of course vacation has a rather different meaning when you work for yourself and really enjoy what you do. But I will slow down a bit. My plan is to push through my handful of due writing projects over the next 2 weeks or so. I will continue to work through my strategy engagements. Then I will really start thinking about what 2015 looks like. Though I admit the slightly slower pace has given me opportunity to be thankful for everything. Certainly those higher highs, but also the lower lows. It’s all part of the experience I can let make me crazy, or I can accept bumps as part of the process. I guess all we can do each year is try to grow from every experience and learn from the stuff that doesn’t go well. For better and worse, I learned a lot this year. So I am happy as I write this although I know happiness is fleeting – so I’ll enjoy the feeling while I can. And then I will get back to living in the moment – there really isn’t anything else. –Mike Photo credit: “wind-up dog” originally uploaded by istolethetv The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the conference this year. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. November 25 – Numbness October 27 – It’s All in the Cloud October 6 – Hulk Bash September 16 – Apple Pay August 18 – You Can’t Handle the Gartner July 22 – Hacker Summer Camp July 14 – China and Career Advancement June 30 – G Who Shall Not Be Named June 17 – Apple and Privacy May 19 – Wanted Posters and SleepyCon May 12 – Another 3 for 5: McAfee/OSVDB, XP Not Dead, CEO head rolling Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud: Evolving to the CloudSOC Technical Considerations Solution Architectures Emerging SOC Use Cases Introduction Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network The Future is Encrypted Newly Published Papers Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development Trends in Data Centric Security Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management The Security Pro’s Guide to Cloud File Storage and Collaboration The 2015 Endpoint and Mobile Security Buyer’s Guide Open Source Development and Application Security Analysis Advanced Endpoint and Server Protection The Future of Security Incite 4 U CISO in the clink… I love this headline: Can a CISO serve jail time? Duh, of course they can. If they deal meth out of the data center, they can certainly go to jail. Oh, can they be held accountable for breaches and negligence within their organization? Predictably, the answer is: it depends. If you are clearly negligent then all bets are off. But if you act in the best interests of the organization as you see them … it is hard to see how a CISO could be successfully prosecuted. That said, there is a chance, so you need to consult a lawyer before taking the job to understand where your liability begins and ends (based on your agreement), and then you can make an informed decision on whether to take the job. Or at least build some additional protection into your agreement. – MR Productivity Killer: Sometimes we need a reminder that security isn’t all about data breaches and DDoS. Sometimes something far far worse happens. Just ask Sony Pictures. Last week employees showed up to work to find their entire infrastructure compromised and offline. Yep, down to some black hat hax0rs graphic taking over everyone’s computer screens, just like in… er… the movies. I don’t find any humor in this. Despite what Sony is doing to the Spider-Man franchise, they are just a company with people trying to get their jobs done, make a little scratch, and build products

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