Monitoring Matters

This week in the security sphere, we have a rare opportunity to talk about something unrelated to AI. Unfortunately, the circumstances are anything but fortunate. You may have already guessed that I’m referring to the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, a crime so brazen and so publicly visible that updates have occasionally interrupted Olympic coverage. I’m not ready to call it our generation’s Lindbergh baby, but it’s shocking how little apparent progress has been made so long...

Two topics are swirling around my brain tonight, cloud and data privacy, and they both meet at the intersection of money. Obviously, this is Data Privacy Week and depending on when you read this it might be Data Protection Day, so the theme is both timely and important. On the other side, while the Brivo/Eagle Eye/merger is still fresh in my mind, I am looking at the importance of that data protection viewed through the lens of physical security integrated with cloud services. Unified cloud...

It’s a busy day for me as I beat down doors to secure some final stories for my issue this month, and I’ve got to ask, who made things so busy after the holidays? Deadlines being as unforgiving and permanent as they are, I endeavored to jump the gun a bit and get ahead of the post-holiday rush by putting out feelers on stories early in the hopes of avoiding the usual rigmarole. So, imagine how unpleasantly surprised I was to get several cancellations and postponement emails...

While the rest of the country is buried under snow, I’ve found it unseasonably warm, and I’m hot under the collar this week as I have to deal with security issues of my own. That’s right readers, due to a comedy of errors for the past two weeks I’ve found myself on the wrong side of OPSEC and as a result subject to the extreme annoyances of extra security measures. But I’m following through with the process until things get resolved because accountability is important. So,...

Now that the chaos of Thanksgiving is over, we’re free to dive back into recent events in the security world, slightly more turkey than man percentage wise. I had several good topics ready to go this week when Editor Cory Harris approached me and asked if I had seen the new TSA announcement, and readers, I had not. You can read all the sordid details with us online, but the long and short of it is suddenly a lot of things make more sense. The act to implement REAL ID officially passed...

Despite ISC East next week, the news feels a little slow lately, but that won’t stop me from digging into a few of this week’s biggest security topics.              Like the hack of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) late last week. I know it’s passé to keep harping on about cybersecurity but between the “reorganization” of the CISA and funding cuts, a major breach occurring during the government shutdown seemed more than...

As I settled in to enjoy my weekend last Friday, you might well imagine my reaction to the headline, “Armed police handcuff teen after AI mistakes crisp packet for gun in U.S.” It would probably have been something along the lines of, “Here we go again,” except that I had just fallen ill so it was more like, “Blergh,” and I most certainly did not enjoy my weekend. I did, however, have a lot of time to reflect on the incident, which saw a false positive...

I don’t know about you, but my weekend was filled with something I rarely expect here in the warm and dry climate of Arizona: rain. While a pleasant diversion for me, for some of my neighboring communities the sudden onset of weather was a less welcome fact that brought flooding and damage to infrastructure around the state. You could lay the results of this weather event at any number of feet, but I think that a lack of preparedness certainly didn’t help. You might have caught...

I started this week with a bit of FOMO since I am missing from GSX this year, but then I realized that, other than a bevy of new product releases, I could probably guess what this year's new show buzzword is. My bet? Agentic AI. I can’t seem to open an email in the last month without the phrase being embedded somewhere in the content. So even though I’m not there in person, walking the floor, I can well imagine the type of conversations I’m missing out on. To that point...

ADT is looking a little thinner this week, but it’s not Ozempic - it’s just business as Everon and its parent company GTCR make some savvy acquisitions on literally the same day. If you’re out of the loop on the situation in residential security right now, new builds continue to be stuck in the same stale economic funk they have been thanks to interest rates and, well, everything else right now. A lot of companies as a result have focused on retrofitting homes with smart tech...