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Incite 4/1/2015: Fooling Time

Mike Rothman April 1, 2015 No Comments

As we started recording the Firestarter Monday Rich announced the date. When he said “March 30”, it was kind of jarring. It’s March 30? How did that happen? Wasn’t it just yesterday we rang in the new year? I guess it was almost 90 yesterdays. Thankfully Rich cut me off as I went down the rabbit hole of wondering where the time went.   Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say – Pink Floyd, “Time” Yup, I’m in one of those moods. You know, the mood where you are digging up Pink Floyd lyrics. Though it’s true – every year does seem to get shorter. It’s hard to find the time to do everything you want to. Everything you plan to. You can’t fool time, even on April Fool’s day. Time just keeps moving forward, which is what we all need to do. I have become painfully aware of the value of time this year. It seems I have been in a cycle of work, run, yoga, travel, car pools, LAX games, and maybe a little sleep now and again. But when I pick my head up every so often, I see things changing. Right before my eyes. XX1 is no longer a little girl. She’s almost as tall as the Boss and is talking to me about getting her driver’s permit in 6 months. What? My little muncha driving? How can that be? And people you know unexpectedly pass on. Many of us in the security community knew Michael Hamelin (@hackerjoe), and then over the holidays he was gone. Taken in a freak car accident. It makes you think about how you are using the short amount of time you have. I had a wave of inspiration and posted a few things on Twitter that day.   I’m fortunate to be a mentor, advisor, and friend to lots of folks who come to me for advice and perspective. I talk about courage a lot with these people. The courage to be who you want to be, regardless of who you ‘should’ be. The courage to make changes, if changes are necessary. The courage to get beyond your comfort zone and grow. It’s not easy to be courageous. Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way – Pink Floyd, “Time” Many people choose to just march through life, even if they aren’t happy or fulfilled, and that’s okay. But time will move on, regardless of what you decide to do, or not do. If you think things will change without you changing them, you aren’t fooling time. You are only fooling yourself. –Mike Photo credit: “hourglass_cropped“_ originally uploaded by openDemocracy Have you registered for Disaster Recovery Breakfast VII yet? What are you waiting for. Check out the invite and then RSVP to rsvp (at) securosis.com so we know how much food to get… 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. March 31 – Using RSA March 16 – Cyber Cash Cow March 2 – Cyber vs. Terror (yeah, we went there) February 16 – Cyber!!! February 9 – It’s Not My Fault! January 26 – 2015 Trends January 15 – 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 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-based Threat Detection Overcoming the Limits of Prevention Applied Threat Intelligence Building a TI Program Use Case #3, Preventative Controls Use Case #2, Incident Response/Management Use Case #1, Security Monitoring Defining TI Network Security Gateway Evolution Introduction Recently Published Papers Endpoint Defense: Essential Practices Cracking the Confusion: Encryption & Tokenization for Data Centers, Servers & Applications Security and Privacy on the Encrypted Network Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security Securing Enterprise Applications Secure Agile Development Trends in Data Centric Security Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management The Future of Security Incite 4 U Better breach disclosure: I hate it when stuff I use gets breached. I have to change passwords and the like. It’s just a hassle. But it does provide a learning opportunity, if the pwned company will talk about what happened. The latest disclosure darling seems to be Slack. You know, the chat app everyone seems to use. Evidently they had an attacker in their user database and some private information was accessible. Things like email addresses and password hashes. Theor payment and financial information was apparently not accessible (segmentation FTW). Now they don’t know whether user data was actually accessed (but we need to assume it was). Nor do they have any proof passwords were decrypted. But at least they are candid about what they don’t know. And even better, they took action to address the issue. Like turning on two-factor authentication before it was quite ready. And providing a tool for an administrator to log everyone out of the system and force a password reset.

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