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Incite 3/9/2016: Star Lord

Mike Rothman March 9, 2016 2 Comments

Everything is a game nowadays. Not like Words with Friends (why yes, since you ask – I do enjoy getting my ass kicked by the women in my life) or even Madden Mobile (which the Boy plays constantly) – I’m talking about gamification. In our security world, the idea is that rank and file employees will actually pay attention to security stuff they don’t give a rat’s ass about… if you make it all into a game. So get departments to compete for who can do best in the phishing simulation. Or give a bounty to the team with the fewest device compromises due to surfing pr0n. Actually, though, it might be more fun to post the link that compromised the machine in the first place. The employee with the nastiest NSFW link would win. And get fired… But I digress. I find that I do play these games. But not on my own device. I’m kind of obsessed with Starbucks’ loyalty program. If you accumulate 12 stars you get a free drink. It’s a great deal for me. I get a large brewed coffee most days. I don’t buy expensive lattes, and I get the same star for every drink I buy. And if I have the kids with me, I’ll perform 3 or 4 different transactions, so I can get multiple stars. When I get my reward drink, I get a 7 shot Mocha. Yes, 7 shots. I’m a lot of fun in the two hours after I drink my reward. And then Starbucks sends out promotions. For a while, if you ordered a drink through their mobile app, you’d get an extra star. So I did. I’d sit in their store, bust open my phone, order the drink, and then walk up to the counter and get it. Win! Extra star! Sometimes they’d offer 3 extra stars if you bought a latte drink, an iced coffee, and a breakfast sandwich within a 3-day period. Well, a guy’s gotta eat, right? And I was ordering the iced coffee anyway in the summer. Win! Three bonus stars. Sometimes they’d send a request for a survey and give me a bunch of stars for filling it out. Win! I might even be honest on the survey… but probably not. As long as I get my stars, I’m good. Yes, I’m gaming the system for my stars. And I have two reward drinks waiting for me, so evidently it’s working. I’m going to be in Starbucks anyway, and drinking coffee anyway – I might as well optimize for free drinks. Oh crap, what the hell have I become? A star whore? Ugh. Let’s flip that perspective. I’m the Star Lord. Yes! I like that. Who wants to be Groot? Pretty much every loyalty program gets gamed. If you travel like I do, you have done the Dec 30 or 31 mileage run to make the next level in a program. You stay in a crappy Marriott 20 miles away from your meeting, instead of the awesome hotel right next to the client’s office. Just to get the extra night. You do it. Everyone does. And now it’s a cat and mouse game. The airlines change their programs every 2-3 years, to force customers to find new ways to optimize milage accumulation. Starbucks is changing their program to reward customers based on what they spend. The nerve of them. Now it will take twice as long to get my reward drinks. Until I figure out how to game this version of the program. And I will, because to me gaming their game is the game. –Mike Photo credit: “Star-Lord ord” from Dex 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), as well as deep dives on cloud security, threat protection, and data security. And there is a ton of meme goodness… Check out the blog post or download the guide directly (PDF). 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. Feb 17 – RSA Conference – The Good, Bad and Ugly 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 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 Advanced Use Cases 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 An expensive lie: Many organizations don’t really take security seriously. It has never been proven that breaches cause

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