Monitoring Matters

I was asked to make a Thanksgiving-themed blog this week, and since I aim to please, let’s get busy talking about some turkeys. If you didn’t pick up on the pun in this week’s title, I’m looking at headlines today for Samuel Altman being fired by the board from his position as CEO for OpenAI. If that sentence confused you at all, don’t worry, I don’t get it either. Yeah, I don’t go for the whole cult of personality that has begun to develop around him,...

We’re about a week away from ISC East, but I’m not going to be there for this one, so let’s have a cybersecurity topic this week on Monitoring Matters instead. In fact, if you want to do a bit of studying before your homework this week, please take the time to read Bud Broomhead’s excellent guest editorial on security infrastructure. One of the topics it covers is the recent ransomware attacks that affected Las Vegas casino groups MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment. I...

As promised, I’m going to talk up a particular subject for this week’s Monitoring Matters, and we’re going to discuss lawsuits! While I write this the witching hour has come to pass and Halloween has run its course for the year, although probably not all the sugar in some of your bloodstreams (shame on you, that was your child’s candy). October went out with a bang however, with a couple of really big announcements for the security industry over the course of the month....

This week I took a break from the security industry to reflect on news from the security guard industry, and the title probably doesn’t mean what you think it does. Let’s get that news out of the way up front since it’s the least heavy topic. Well, actually bears are pretty heavy. A security guard in Aspen made the unfortunate discovery of a bear in a kitchen at a local resort. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife the guard was responding to a call about the bear when he...

Another week, another grab bag of security topics to blog about with news of varying degrees of importance, but it’s all noteworthy. Keeping with the theme of this week’s blog title we’re talking about Twitter again. Let me preempt this by saying, no, I’m not calling it “X”, and no, it’s not about who you think it is. It’s actually been roughly about a year since they last heavily featured in this blog space when Peiter Zatko testified in front of...

I’ve decided that the theme of this week’s blog will meander a bit more than usual, since there’s a couple of topics to check off the list. First off, I wish you all the best health as it feels like it’s finally transitioning to fall here in Arizona. That’s normally the time of year when bugs start going around. This might be the first year on record that the virus you have to watch out for is a computer virus. I want to say the past two months have been host...

I hope you will be both refreshed and comfortable as you read this week’s blog, safe in the knowledge that you will have achieved more restful sleep than I have, dear readers. That’s right, I’m burning the midnight oil lately as I have spent this week chasing the last of my GSX content out the door. Well, there’s bound to be some leftovers, but come next week I’ll be back into the normal flow as I gear up to tackle October (it’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month,...

I survived my trip back from GSX mostly unscathed, but unfortunately, now I will be neck deep in transcription with all the wonderful interviews I conducted while there. One pleasant surprise I had waiting for me when I returned was probably the best response to our news poll we’ve had since I started here at Security Systems News (SSN). It may be that it was just a topic ripe for discussion or a controversial enough decision by ADT, but reader response and comments were phenomenal and that...

For me, there’s a few more meetings to go yet at GSX this year, but odds are by the time you’re reading this we’ll be wrapped and headed home. It’s been a good show this year, although I think a lot of attendees made the comment that the first day felt slow. That momentum certainly picked up on the second day, so I was thankful for all the exhibitors that were good enough to leave coffee stations all over the show floor. There were several large pieces of news, and product...

This week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the Secure by Design pledge for K-12 education technology providers in order to shore up cyber defenses in the classroom. This caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One is that this is just another of several similar proposals I’ve seen issued lately, I think this is the second one from the CISA? I know that I’ve talked to a few CEO’s who take these pledge’s seriously, or at the very...