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.

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

SIEM Kung Fu

Building a Threat Intelligence Program

Recently Published Papers

Incite 4 U

  1. Phisherman’s dream: Brian Krebs has written a lot about small and mid-sized companies being targets for scammers over the last couple years, with both significant financial losses directly from fraud, and indirectly from the ensuing court battles about who ends up paying the bill. Through friends and family, we have been hearing a lot more about this in relation to real estate transactions, captured in recent article from the Arizona Association of Realtors Hackers Perpetuate Wire Transfer Fraud Scams. Hacking the buyers, mortgage brokers, and title companies, scammers are able to both propel a transaction forward through fake authorizations, and direct funds to the wrong accounts. And once one party is compromised it’s fairly easy to get the other parties too, meaning much of the process can be orchestrated remotely. What’s particularly insidious is that these attacks naturally lead all parties into making major security misjudgments. You trust the emails because they look like they are coming from people you are waiting to hear from, with content you want to see. The result is large sums of money willingly transferred to the wrong accounts; with buyers, sellers, agents, banks, and mortgage brokers all fighting to clean up the mess. – AL
  2. EMET and the reality of software: This recent story about a defect in Microsoft’s EMET which allows attackers to basically turn it off, presents an opportunity to highlight a number of things. First, all software has bugs. Period. This bug, found by the folks at FireEye, turns EMET against itself. It’s code. It’s complicated. And that means there will be issues. No software is secure. Even the stuff that’s supposed to secure us. But EMET is awesome and free. So use it. The other big takeaway from this is the importance of timely patching. Microsoft fixed this issue last Patch Tuesday, Feb 2. It’s critical to keep devices up to date. I know it’s hard and you have a lot of devices. Do it anyway. It’s one of the best ways to reduce attack surface. – MR
  3. My list: On the Veracode blog Jeff Cratty explains to security pros the 5 things I need from you. Discussions like this are really helpful for security people trying to work with developers. Understanding the challenges and priorities each side faces every day makes working together a hell of a lot easier. Empathy FTW. I like Jeff’s list, but I could narrow down mine to two things. First, get me the “air cover” I need to prioritize security over features. Without empowerment by senior management, security issues will never get worked on. DevOps and continuous integration has been great in this regard as teams – for the first time ever – prioritize infrastructure over features, but someone needs to help get security onto the queue. Second, tell me the threats I should really worry about, and get me a list of suitable responses so I can choose what is best for our application stack and deployment model. There are usually many ways to address a specific risk, and I want options, not mandates. – AL
  4. Cutting through the fog of endpoint security marketing: If you are considering updating your endpoint protection (as you should be), Lenny Zeltser offers a great post on questions to ask an endpoint security startup. It’s basically a primer to make any new generation endpoint security player educate you on why and how they are different. They’ll say, “we use math,” like that’s novel. Or “we leverage the cloud” – ho hum. Maybe they’ll drop “deep forensics” nonsense on you. Not that any of those things are false. But it’s really about understanding how they are different. Not just from traditional endpoint protection, but also from the dozens of other new endpoint security players. Great job, Lenny. It’s hard to separate marketing fiction from fact in early markets. Ask these questions to start figuring it out. And make sure your BS detector is working – you’ll need it. – MR
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