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Incite 2/29/2016: Leap Day

Mike Rothman February 29, 2016 No Comments

Today is leap day, the last day of February in a leap year. That means the month of February has 29 days. It happens once every 4 years. I have one friend (who I know of) with a birthday on Leap Day. That must have been cool. You feel very special every four years. And you just jump on the Feb 28 bandwagon to celebrate your birthday in non-leap years. Win/win. The idea of a four-year cycle made me curious. What was I doing during leap day in 2012? Turns out I was doing the same thing I’ll be doing today – running between meetings at the RSA Conference. This year, leap day is on Monday, and that’s the day I usually spend at the America’s Growth Capital Conference, networking with CEOs and investors. It’s a great way to take the temperature of the money side of the security industry. And I love to moderate the panels, facilitating debate between leaders of the security industry. Maybe I’ll even interject an opinion or two during the event. That’s been known to happen. Then I started looking back at my other calendar entries for 2012. The boy was playing baseball. Wow, that seems like a long time ago since it seems like forever he’s been playing lacrosse. The girls were dancing, and they had weekend practices getting ready for their June Disney trip. XX1 was getting ready for her middle school orientation. Now she’s in high school. The 4 years represent less than 10% of my life. But a full third of the twins’ existence. That’s a strange thought. And have I made progress professionally? I think so. Our business has grown. We’ll have probably three times the number of people at the Disaster Recovery Breakfast, if that’s any measure of success. The cloud security work we do barely provided beer money in 2012, and now it’s the future of Securosis. I’ve deepened relationships with some clients and stopped working with others. Many of my friends have moved to different gigs. But overall I’m happy with my professional progress. Personally I’m a fundamentally different person. I have described a lot of my transformation here in the Incite, or at least its results. I view the world differently now. I was figuring out which mindfulness practices worked for me back in 2012. That was also the beginning of a multi-year process to evaluate who I was and what changes I needed for the next phase of my life. Over the past four years, I have done a lot of work personally and made those changes. I couldn’t be happier with the trajectory of my life right now. So this week I’m going to celebrate with many close friends. Security is what I do, and this week is one of the times we assemble en masse. What’s not to love? Even cooler is that I have no idea what I’ll be writing about in 2020. My future is unwritten, and that’s very exciting. I do know that by the next time a leap year comes along, XX1 will be midway through college. The twins will be driving (oy, my insurance bill!). And in all likelihood, I’ll be at the RSA Conference hanging out with my friends at the W, waiting patiently for a drink. Most things change, but some stuff stays the same. And there is comfort in that. –Mike Photo credit: “60:366” from chrisjtse We’ve published this year’s Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference. It’s our take on the key themes you’ll see at this year’s conference (which is really a proxy for the industry), along with deep dives into cloud security, threat protection, and data security. And there is a ton of meme goodness… Check out the post or download the guide directly (PDF). It’s that time of year again! The 8th annual Disaster Recovery Breakfast will once again happen at the RSA Conference. Thursday morning, March 3 from 8 – 11 at Jillians. Check out the invite or just email us at rsvp (at) securosis.com to make sure we have an accurate count. 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. Your emails, alerts, and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our 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. Dec 8 – 2015 Wrap Up and 2016 Non-Predictions Nov 16 – The Blame Game Nov 3 – Get Your Marshmallows Oct 19 – re:Invent Yourself (or else) Aug 12 – Karma July 13 – Living with the OPM Hack May 26 – We Don’t Know Sh–. You Don’t Know Sh– May 4 – RSAC wrap-up. Same as it ever was. 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 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. Securing Hadoop Architectural Security Issues Architecture and Composition Security Recommendations for NoSQL platforms SIEM Kung Fu Fundamentals Building a Threat Intelligence Program Success and Sharing Using TI Gathering TI Introduction Recently Published Papers Threat Detection Evolution Building Security into DevOps Pragmatic Security for Cloud and Hybrid Networks EMV Migration and the Changing Payments Landscape Applied Threat Intelligence 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 The Future of Security Incite 4 U Phisherman’s dream: Brian Krebs has written a lot about small and mid-sized companies being targets for scammers over the last

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