A few weeks ago I spoke about dealing with the inevitable changes of life and setting sail on the SS Uncertainty to whatever is next. It’s very easy to talk about changes and moving forward, but it’s actually pretty hard to do. When moving through a transformation, you not only have to accept the great unknown of the future, but you also need to grapple with what society expects you to do. We’ve all been programmed since a very early age to adhere to cultural norms or suffer the consequences. Those consequences may be minor, like having your friends and family think you’re an idiot. Or decisions could result in very major consequences, like being ostracized from your community, or even death in some areas of the world.

In my culture in the US, it’s expected that a majority of people should meander through their lives; with their 2.2 kids, their dog, and their white picket fence, which is great for some folks. But when you don’t fit into that very easy and simple box, moving forward along a less conventional path requires significant courage.

I recently went skiing for the first time in about 20 years. Being a ski n00b, I invested in two half-day lessons – it would have been inconvenient to ski right off the mountain. The first instructor was an interesting guy in his 60’s, a US Air Force helicopter pilot who retired and has been teaching skiing for the past 25 years. His seemingly conventional path worked for him – he seemed very happy, especially with the artificial knee that allowed him to ski a bit more aggressively. But my instructor on the second day was very interesting. We got a chance to chat quite a bit on the lifts, and I learned that a few years ago he was studying to be a physician’s assistant. He started as an orderly in a hospital and climbed the ranks until it made sense for him to go to school and get a more formal education. So he took his tests and applied and got into a few programs.

Then he didn’t go. Something didn’t feel right. It wasn’t the amount of work – he’d been working since he was little. It wasn’t really fear – he knew he could do the job. It was that he didn’t have passion for a medical career. He was passionate about skiing. He’d been teaching since he was 16, and that’s what he loved to do. So he sold a bunch of his stuff, minimized his lifestyle, and has been teaching skiing for the past 7 years. He said initially his Mom was pretty hard on him about the decision. But as she (and the rest of his family) realized how happy and fulfilled he is, they became OK with his unconventional path.

Now that is courage. But he said something to me as we were about to unload from the lift for the last run of the day. “Mike, this isn’t work for me. I happened to get paid, but I just love teaching and skiing, so it doesn’t feel like a job.” It was inspiring because we all have days when we know we aren’t doing what we’re passionate about. If there are too many of those days, it’s time to make changes.

Changes require courage, especially if the path you want to follow doesn’t fit into the typical playbook. But it’s your life, not theirs. So climb aboard the SS Uncertainty (with me) and embark on a wild and strange adventure. We get a short amount of time on this Earth – make the most of it. I know I’m trying to do just that.

Editors note: despite Mike’s post on courage, he declined my invitation to go ski Devil’s Crotch when we are out in Colorado. Just saying. -rich

–Mike

Photo credit: “Courage” from bfick

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

* The Future of Security

Incite 4 U

  1. Evolution visually: Wade Baker posted a really awesome piece tracking the number of sessions and titles at the RSA Conference over the past 25 years. The growth in sessions is astounding (25% CAGR), up to almost 500 in 2015. Even more interesting is how the titles have changed. It’s the RSA Conference, so it’s not surprising that crypto would be prominent the first 10 years. Over the last 5? Cloud and cyber. Not surprising, but still very interesting facts. RSAC is no longer just a trade show. It’s a whole thing, and I’m looking forward to seeing the next iteration in a few weeks. And come swing by the DRB Thursday morning and say hello. I’m pretty sure the title of the Disaster Recovery Breakfast won’t change. – MR
  2. Embrace and Extend: The SSL/TLS cert market is a multi-billion dollar market – with slow and steady growth in the sale of certificates for websites and devices over the last decade. For the most part, certificate services are undifferentiated. Mid-to-large enterprises often manage thousands of them, which expire on a regular basis, making subscription revenue a compelling story for the handful of firms that provide them. But last week’s announcement that Amazon AWS will provide free certificates must have sent shivers through the market, including the security providers who manage certs or monitor for expired certificates. AWS will include this in their basic service, as long as you run your site in AWS. I expect Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud to follow suit in order to maintain feature/pricing parity. Certs may not be the best business to be in, longer-term. – AL
  3. Investing in the future: I don’t normally link to vendor blogs, but this post by Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, is pretty interesting. He echoes a bunch of things we’ve been talking about, including how the security industry is people-constrained, and we need to address that. He also mentions a bunch of security issues, s maybe security is highly visible in security. Even better, Chuck announced a $10MM scholarship program to “educate, train and reskill the job force to be the security professionals needed to fill this vast talent shortage”. This is great to see. We need to continue to invest in humans, and maybe this will kick start some other companies to invest similarly. – MR
  4. Geek Monkey: David Mortman pointed me to a recent post about Automated Failure testing on Netflix’s Tech blog. A particularly difficult to find bug gave the team pause in how they tested protocols. Embracing both the “find failure faster” mentality, and the core Simian Army ideal of reliability testing through injecting chaos, they are looking at intelligent ways to inject small faults within the code execution path. Leveraging a very interesting set of concepts from a tool called Molly (PDF), they inject different results into non-deterministic code paths. That sounds exceedingly geeky, I know, but in simpler terms they are essentially fuzz testing inside code, using intelligently selected values to see how protocols respond under stress. Expect a lot more of this approach in years to come, as we push more code security testing earlier in the process. – AL
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