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Incite 5/20/2016: Dance of Joy

Mike Rothman May 20, 2016 No Comments

Perception of time is a funny thing. As we wind down the school year in Atlanta, it’s hard to believe how quickly this year has flown by. It seems like yesterday XX1 was starting high school and the twins were starting middle school. I was talking to XX1 last week as she was driving herself to school (yes, that’s a surreal statement) and she mentioned that she couldn’t believe the school year was over. I tried to explain that as you get older, time seems to move more quickly. The following day I was getting a haircut with the Boy and our stylist was making conversation. She asked him if the school year seemed to fly by. He said, “Nope! It was sooooo slow.” They are only 3 years apart, but clearly the perception of time changes as tweens become teens. The end of the school year always means dance recitals. For over 10 years now I’ve been going to recitals to watch my girls perform. From when they were little munchies in their tiny tutus watching the teacher on the side of the stage pantomiming the routine, to now when they both are advanced dancers doing 7-8 routines each year, of all disciplines. Ballet (including pointe), Jazz, Modern, Tap, Lyrical. You name it and my girls do it. A lot of folks complain about having to go to recitals. I went to all 3 this year. There is no place I’d rather be. Watching my girls dance is one of the great joys of my life. Seeing them grow from barely being able to do a pirouette to full-fledged dancers has been incredible. I get choked up seeing how they get immersed in performance, and how happy it makes them to be on stage. Although this year represents a bit of a turning point. XX2 decided to stop dancing and focus on competitive cheerleading. There were lots of reasons, but it mostly came down to passion. She was serious about improving her cheerleading skills, constantly stretching and working on core strength to improve her performance. She was ecstatic when she made the 7th grade competitive cheer team at her school. But when it came time for dance she said, “meh.” So the choice was clear, although I got a little nostalgic watching her last dance recital. It’s been a good run and I look forward to seeing her compete in cheer. I’m the first to embrace change and chase passions. When something isn’t working, you make changes, knowing full well that it requires courage – lots of people resist change. Her dance company gave her a bit of a hard time and the teachers weren’t very kind during her last few months at the studio. But it’s OK – people show themselves at some point, and we learned a lot about those people. Some are keepers, and XX2 will likely maintain those relationships as others fade away. It’s just like life. You realize who your real friends are when you make changes. Savor those friendships and let all the others go. We have precious few moments – don’t waste them on people who don’t matter. –Mike Photo credit: “Korean Modern Dance” from Republic of Korea Security is changing. So is Securosis. Check out Rich’s post on how we are evolving our business. We’ve published this year’s Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference. It’s our take on the key themes of 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. May 2 – What the hell is a cloud anyway? Mar 16 – The Rugged vs. SecDevOps Smackdown 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! 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. Incident Response in the Cloud Age Shifting Foundations Understanding and Selecting RASP Technology Overview Introduction Maximizing WAF Value Management Deployment Introduction Resilient Cloud Network Architectures Design Patterns Fundamentals Shadow Devices Seeing into the Shadows Attacks The Exponentially Expanding Attack Surface Building a Vendor IT Risk Management Program Ongoing Management and Communication Evaluating Vendor Risk Program Structure Understanding Vendor IT Risk Recently Published Papers SIEM Kung Fu Securing Hadoop 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 Monitoring the Hybrid Cloud Best Practices for AWS Security The Future of Security Incite 4 U The Weakest Link: Huge financial institutions spend a ton of money on security. They buy and try one of everything, and have thousands of security professionals to protect their critical information. And they still get hacked, but it’s

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