Hey everyone, it’s another Sunday! I hope the weekend is treating you well! ☺️
It’s been about a week now that I’ve made the changes to my blog, and I have to say, I am very happy with them. Everything seems so much more cohesive and ties so well together with the image I had chosen months ago. I still can’t believe that the inspiration was staring me in the face for so long, but only just revealed itself to me a mere week ago. Inspiration sure can be fickle and unpredictable, let me tell you. Sometimes it flows so freely, and sometimes it will sneak up on you and just smack you upside the head. 🤣
I recognize and admit that I am perpetually tweaking and changing things regarding my blog, social media, and my branding, but in its current state, I must say that I am very happy with how everything has come together. I may still do some extremely minor tweaks here and there, like changing fonts, or an image, but I don’t foresee any major changes in my future — at least the foreseeable future. I still haven’t figured out whether my seemingly constant desire to change things is a good or bad thing, haha. 😆
Which also reminds me: I have also updated my logo/social media profile pictures! I had posted it all over my social media, but I hadn’t said anything about it here. (Side note: I also need to remind myself that I am allowed to make blog posts on here anytime I want, not just once a week, and they can be as long or as short as I want them to be)
These designs were completely by happenstance. I was playing around on my iPhone using Image Playground to create a new avatar to use for my contact photo and poster, when I liked the results so much, I wanted to use them across social media. I even incorporated my (then) current logo into them, to keep a little continuity. Behold, the new logos!
Naturally, I had to also incorporate my favorite color in the background. 😉
The Exposed Shore
I realized that my posts lately have been relatively light on the cybersecurity front, especially as I’ve tried very hard to recapture my creativity. While I don’t feel it’s fully been restored, I do feel more creative than I have been in many weeks now. I also feel it was partly due to the fact that there really hasn’t been very much going on in the field that I felt warranted any need to write about, and add my thoughts or advice on. Sure, there have been constant attacks and data breaches occurring, but sadly, this has become the norm nowadays. I wanted to draw from work events for this week, along with an idea that literally just popped into my head while thinking about what to write.
There are been a few minor security incidents at work the last few weeks. None of them have been severe, thankfully, but a large number of them resulted in having a user’s computer collected by a tech, completely erased, and set up again from scratch. Luckily, none of these events resulted in data loss. The triggers have run the gamut from clicking links in phishing emails, to installing software applications from questionable sources. None of these were done with malicious intent, but they have struck a chord with me.
With the exception of one incident, all of them were reported to us by central IT, who had received alerts from various sources (e.g., antivirus, vulnerability monitoring software) that are required to be installed on all university-owned devices that are connected to the network. The one exception was self-reported by the user because they noticed their computer being controlled remotely. 😱
These occurrences really had me wondering why no one reported them to us directly. One possibility is that they didn’t know of the compromise, but my gut says that it’s simply because they were afraid to alert us. This is especially dangerous — under the right circumstances, central IT (and by extension, our group) may never know of an incident, and very bad things happen.
I want everyone to be as secure as possible — not only at work, but I want those secure habits to carry over into people’s personal lives as well. Unfortunately at work, many folks believe that IT (especially our group, as we have direct contact) exists to put up as many roadblocks as possible, and to tell them “no” at every opportunity. Because of this assumption, they fear alerting anyone to issues or incidents, assuming that they will be berated, ridiculed, or even worse: blocked from the internet, or perhaps even terminated. While I don’t think termination would be a result in most cases, this is an unfortunate mindset of our user base.
It’s no secret that I strongly believe that not only must we be secure in how we operate, but we must also enable people to do their work. Obviously, there needs to be some compromises, on both sides. We cannot completely lock down systems, iron curtain style, but we also cannot have the Wild West, with systems completely open and free. There will inevitably be some incurred risk by these compromises, and part of my role is to make the risk as small as possible.
To be able to do that effectively, I need to learn how things work. I need to learn workflows. I especially need to learn pain points. This will help me help not only the users, but help the organization. This will also help me not to say “no” as often, and enable me to work with people to find a better, more secure solution. I am making strides to get out there to learn and familiarize myself with our environment, as well as gain more exposure to leadership to know more about how things work from a higher level — to learn what they see as important.
I want to be the one to turn the “no” into a two-way conversation to find what works for everyone. This writing also put the idea into my head of writing something for our customer wiki portal to encourage people to come to me to have these discussions. I’m thinking of making some kind of form a user can fill out to start these conversations, or even to report something, so hopefully they won’t be afraid, and help shift the culture to have active and productive conversations.
It still surprises me at times where I start writing, and I end up writing much more than I think I’m going to. 😆
Finally, here’s a look at what I wore to work this past week. As always, I hope you enjoy them. Have a most wonderful rest of the weekend, and week ahead! ☺️
-Terry
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