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Incite 1/21/2015: Making the Habit

Mike Rothman January 21, 2015 No Comments

Over halfway through January (already!), how are those New Year’s resolutions going? Did you want to lose some weight? Maybe exercise a bit more? Maybe drink less, or is that just me? Or have some more fun? Whatever you wanted to do, how is that going? If you are like most the resolutions won’t make it out of January. It’s not for lack of desire, as folks that make resolutions really want to achieve the outcomes. In many cases the effort is there initially. You get up and run or hit the gym. You decline dessert. You sit with the calendar and plan some cool activities. Then life. That’s right, things are busy and getting busier. You have more to do and less to do it with. The family demands time (as they should) and the deadlines keep piling up. Travel kicks back in and the cycle starts over again. So you sleep through the alarm a few days. Then every day. The chocolate lava cake looks so good, so you have one. You’ll get back on the wagon tomorrow, right? And then it’s December and you start the cycle over. That doesn’t work very well. So how can you change it? What is the secret to making a habit? There is no secret. Not for me, anyway. It’s about routine. Pure and simple. I need to get into a routine and then the habits just happen. For instance I started running last summer. So 3 days a week I got up early and ran. No pomp. No circumstance. Just get up and run. Now I get up and freeze my ass off some mornings, but I still run. It’s a habit. Same process was used when I started my meditation practice a few years back. I chose not to make the time during the day because I got mired in work stuff. So I got up early. Like really early. I’m up at 5am to get my meditation done, then I get the kids ready for school, then I run or do yoga. I have gotten a lot done by 8am. That’s what I do. It has become a routine. And a routine enables you to form a habit. Am I perfect? Of course not, and I don’t fret when I decide to sleep in. Or when I don’t meditate. Or if I’m a bit sore and skip my run. I don’t judge myself. I let it go. What I don’t do is skip two days. Just as it was very hard to form my habits of both physical and mental practice, it is all too easy to form new less productive habits. Like not running or not meditating. That’s why I don’t miss two days in a row. If I don’t break the routine I don’t break the habit. And these are habits I don’t want to break. –Mike Photo credit: “Good, Bad Habits” originally uploaded by Celestine Chua The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the 2014 conference. 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. January 15 – Full Toddler December 18 – Predicting the Past 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 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 Migration Planning Technical Considerations Solution Architectures Emerging SOC Use Cases Introduction Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Selection Criteria and Deployment Use Cases The Future is Encrypted Newly Published Papers Best Practices for AWS Security 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 Advanced Endpoint and Server Protection The Future of Security Incite 4 U Doing attribution right… Marcus kills it in this post on why attribution is hard. You need to have enough evidence, come up with a feasible motive, corroborate the data with other external data, and build a timeline to understand the attack. But the post gets interesting when Marcus discusses how identifying an attacker based upon TTPs might not work very well. Attackers can fairly easily copy another group’s TTPs to blame them. I think attribution (at least an attempt) can be productive, especially as part of adversary analysis. But understand it is likely unreliable; if you make life and death decisions on this data, I don’t expect it to end well. – MR The crypto wars rise again: Many of you have seen this coming, but in case you haven’t we are hitting the first bump on a rocky road that could dead end in a massive canyon of pain. Encryption has become a cornerstone of information security, used for everything from secure payments to secure communications. The problem is that the same tools used to keep bad guys out also keep the government out. Well, that’s only a problem because politicians seem to gain most of

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