Monitoring Matters

This is it, we’re only one week away from ISC West, and if you’re reading this, then - like me - you’re just counting the days. My itinerary and show schedule are set and let me tell you it is packed full! Editor Cory Harris told me to make sure that I had a good pair of shoes for walking the floor and I had the good fortune to order a brand-new pair this week. They’re scheduled to get here Friday…I hope. Either way me and whatever kicks I’m sporting will...

If you’re following the news this week, you’ve probably heard about the woes surrounding Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and its ultimate demise due to poor management. Not exactly a security topic strictly speaking, but the minute I heard about it my mind wandered to who was getting stung by the collapse of the financial institution. At first, I didn’t turn up much of interest to me personally, but then I saw it. Latch Inc., the deeply embattled residential security platform,...

I came, I saw, I stole their customers. Vivint has been having a rough time of it lately with multiple lawsuits hanging above its head, one of which already resolved decidedly not in their favor. It might be important to examine the root cause of this problem which is that it looks like Vivint doesn’t like to share. Most of these lawsuits specifically would term it deceptive business practices. At the end of the day Vivint saw some customers that weren’t theirs and decided to change...

Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) this week. Not just because John Oliver just did his video on the same subject, because let’s be honest, we’ve all been talking about A.I. for a while now. Especially in the security industry, half of the articles I write these days are from companies working with machine learning to improve cybersecurity, or training A.I. with media to better understand threat detection in monitoring software. Now there’s a lot of anxiety...

I’m guessing we all saw the same news report, right? 2023 on track to be a record-breaking year for guns found at airport checkpoints, 6,542 found in 2022, 88 percent of which were loaded. Oops, all bullets, that’s a lot of bad decisions! I mean if I had to rank the top three places you shouldn’t bring a loaded firearm I would probably list: A child’s birthday party Applebee's An airport Maybe not necessarily in that order, but you get the idea,...

I guess we could talk about the train crash in Ohio this week. The result of it, the inevitability, and the literal fallout, but since I can’t think of an immediate tie to that for security let's just say I told you so. Instead, we’ll cover the Chinese Spy Balloons that have so gripped public fervor of late. The politics regarding the response to the balloon is immaterial really. If I had to guess they were probably trying to keep it quiet in the face of Antony Blinken’s...

The Super Bowl is right on the horizon, and I can’t think of many other events that draw quite so much attention, at least not in this country. Naturally that makes it a high-profile security event that will test some of the industry’s top technology and practices. By chance I found myself in downtown Phoenix last weekend near the NFL Experience. Considering it was only a week away from the Super Bowl and a bustling Sunday night I’m surprised the area wasn’t busier. I’d...

Let me start off this week’s blog by saying that the cat is finally out of the bag for Eufy this week as the company admitted to its security cameras producing unencrypted streams for their web portal. Big kudos to Sean Hollister and the journalists at The Verge for leaning in on Anker and getting to the heart of the story like that. I wrote a small piece about it at the time and had much the same response from their PR teams initially, a canned statement, followed by deflection, denial,...

It’s that time of the week where I look at what’s happening in the security world and I tell you what’s interesting. First up, I can’t believe I’m mentioning Pinkerton for a second time in this blog space. It’s kind of like seeing living dinosaurs, only for a second time now and they’re wearing people clothes. That is what I’m going to do, however, because the old once upon a time detective agency turned protection racket and corporate...

In the waning weeks of 2022 I briefly touched on some of the big trends I saw being prevalent in 2023. You’ve got things like Zero Trust security strategies, AI-enhanced security algorithms, cloud-based everything, but I neglected an important one I think, and that’s recurring revenue. I know because its something that’s come up multiple times in the past two weeks. NAPCO has credited its recent growth to recurring revenue, and in interviewing CEO Don Joos this past week its...