Monitoring Matters

When you clicked on this blog today you probably thought I was going to talk about data breaches or cyberattacks, but the jokes on you. That’s right, I refuse to beat that dead horse another week, the cyber-meltdown is taking time off. I’m talking about robots. Well artificial intelligence, drones, and robots to be precise! The next big thing in the security industry, allegedly. It’s hard not to see it everywhere with A.I. and machine learning algorithms built into data protection...

There’s at least one data breach story waiting for me to get around to as I sit and write this. When I wake up tomorrow there will almost certainly be a new one. Cybersecurity has been going through a bit of a meltdown right now as breach after breach has rendered any hope of keeping your personal data secure within the aether of the internet dead. I’m at a loss of what else to say about it, unless you’ve spent the last thirty years living in the woods you’ve almost certainly...

One of the big cybersecurity stories this week, for those tuned in on that frequency, is the trial of former Uber CISO Joe Sullivan. He’s a big name in that corner of the industry brought low by a lawsuit resulting from the cover up of a data breach. This is important because it may be the first time a corporate executive faces criminal liability from a data breach and every other CISO is likely watching this case sweating bullets. Whether they should be or not is another matter. The...

Last week the CHIPS and Science Act was signed and meant to help jumpstart American efforts to supercharge our domestic semiconductor industry and reduce costs of labor while providing jobs to Americans. The answer to what this has to do with security, is everything. Cybersecurity, residential, industrial, national security, the whole shebang. It’s the circle of life. Not just security either, literally everything. You’d be hard pressed to find any product not tagged as a smart device...

I spend a lot of time digging through company PR emails, press releases, LinkedIn posts, tweets, and other corporate media. A lot of it sounds so familiar at this point I could recite it in my sleep, but today I paused for a moment. It was a throwaway line that roughly stated physical security was no longer enough of a deterrent and that clients should look to more electronic methods to be secure. Taking into consideration the last few weeks I’m disinclined to agree. Security guards and...

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about passwords. I mean, who doesn’t do that these days?  Using a new streaming service? Password. Changing financial institutions? Password. Starting a new job? Probably a dozen new passwords. In a recent blog I discussed just how prevalent the data breach has become in our daily lives and how much is affected by it. It reveals our security vulnerabilities all the way down to our habits. That kind of problem isn’t targeted at any...

In early July of this year, one of the largest known data breaches to date occurred that stripped files from a Shanghai police database. The hacker responsible claimed to have stolen terabytes of data relating to as many as one billion Chinese citizens. Known as ChinaDan, the hacker asked for a ransom in digital currency roughly equivalent to $200,000. While it isn’t clear how he got access to the data, it seems likely it could be related to the same method used to gather most of it: social...

Your perspective on current events, I’ve found, is largely shaped by your formative experiences. Being born in the middle of the 80s, I can still just see the last glow of the days where you could leave your door unlocked and children roamed on their bikes for miles unsupervised. The concept of having a phone on your person was almost unheard of. Certainly, security was the last thing on most people’s minds. Fast forward to Sept. 11, 2001, woken from bed before a day in high school...

I’m channeling my wife’s favorite band, U2, for this week’s blog. Why? Well, perhaps you still haven’t found what you’re looking for. I’m not talking about an earring or a set of keys that you’re tearing your room apart trying to find. I’m talking about filling an open job position with a qualified, or perhaps an unqualified candidate for your security company. It’s no secret that hiring good, quality security people has proven to be extremely...

When does security go too far? Of course, security is needed at any venue, indoors or outdoors, to ensure the safety of patrons at a sporting event, concert, convention or any other gathering involving smaller to larger groups of people. Trust me, I’ve been to literally hundreds of sporting events and concerts over the decades ranging from smaller college gymnasiums to baseball stadiums and concerts featuring more than 80,000 people (Billy Joel and Elton John together being the first...