#sparkchamber 100322 — Cybersecurity Awareness Month
As the calendar turns to October, #sparkchamber highlights Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In these increasingly digital, virtual, technology-driven times, threats to identity and personal data safety have become more commonplace. Since 2004, the President of the United States and Congress have declared October to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [CISA] — an agency of the U.S. government working with partners to defend against today’s threats and to build a more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future — and the National Cybersecurity Alliance [NCA] — a non-profit organization on a mission to create a more secure, interconnected world — lead a collaborative effort between government and industry to raise cybersecurity awareness nationally and internationally.
This year’s campaign theme — See Yourself in Cyber — communicates the importance and urgency of each of us take basic steps to protect our own online information and privacy. Toward that end, they spotlight four key action steps that everyone should take:
o Enable multi-factor authentication across all devices
o Use strong passwords everywhere
o Recognize and report phishing [fraudsters sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers]
o Update your software
To kick off the month, we’re re-running a post from June 28, 2021, which introduced puzzle solver and cybersecurity analyst Adrian Sanabria:
Not always top of mind, but unquestionably always just below the surface, cybersecurity is a massive Rubik’s Cube of interconnected and ever-mutating challenges. Today, #sparkchamber is delighted to decipher some of it, welcoming puzzle solver, Adrian Sanabria. In his own words:
Like many others in my field, I was drawn to the cybersecurity field because hacking was the closest thing to magic that I had ever seen. Changes in technology drive security, guaranteeing an inexhaustible supply of challenges for my deep sense of curiosity.
I started off working internal security for companies, making employees aware of threats, building defenses, and investigating incidents. Moving into consulting allowed me to travel and exposed me to a wide variety of businesses. Each company has its own mix of needs, constraints, and challenges — setting up defenses is difficult. It was my job to break or get past these defenses.
I learned how to hack networks, pick locks and trick people out of their passwords. Somewhere along the way, I realized that breaking in was the easy part — helping companies fix and defend against these issues was the real challenge. I discovered a passion for helping people understand security challenges, and the industry as a whole. I became an industry analyst where I wrote and spoke about the industry full-time. There, I got a crash course on business, branding, and marketing side of the industry, often working with founders and marketing teams.
On its best day, cybersecurity is tough to understand and keep up with. Poor messaging and marketing just makes this problem worse. Here I found another challenge — how can cybersecurity vendors market their products with honesty and integrity? It seemed like many resorted to using the fear of a data breach [more commonly extortion, these days] to push their wares. There was a better way, and I could help vendors find it.
These days, I help folks understand and keep up with cybersecurity through weekly podcasts, product reviews, and advising companies directly. I draw most of my influences from outside my industry. Scott Galloway has been an influence in his style as much as his ideas. Marques Brownlee @MKBHD mostly reviews smartphones and other gadgets, but has refined the product review process to an art, and has helped me appreciate the importance of quality and consistency.
All the creators I look up to have one thing in common — they create a huge amount of content and are constantly trying new things and making improvements.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
Learning new things! I consume a lot of content — books, podcasts, YouTube videos, movies, TV shows, documentaries — I have an insatiable curiosity and desire for knowledge. However, I regularly try to go outside my typical interests and look to others for recommendations.
Often, I’ll find myself in the middle of a genre of novel I never thought I’d enjoy, suddenly inspired to write down ideas for my next article or podcast topic.
Cybersecurity concepts can be difficult to get across, so good analogies and metaphors are gold. Also, there’s this sense that this field is somehow unique and special — that we need to invent entirely new solutions to problems. I find that’s often not the case — our problems have been encountered by others and sometimes solved hundreds of years ago.
For example, a few years ago, on a hunch, I started reading up on maritime incidents. Turns out, ship collisions have a lot to teach the cybersecurity industry, because a lot of it comes down to human behavior!
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
Whether I’m doing some research or preparing to give a talk or do a podcast, my drive comes from the same place and I go through a similar process.
It all starts with a question — something poorly understood by myself or my audience. First is the research phase. I LOVE the research phase. The hunt for information, opening a ton of tabs, taking notes, organizing the notes — I enjoy every part of this process. I have all sorts of special apps, pencils, notebooks and other tools to help me research.
Once the research is complete, I have to figure out how to put together a narrative and write the story. I might be writing an op-ed or preparing to moderate a panel, but the process is similar: get to the heart of it, find the questions that matter, answer them as concisely as possible.
Do I need metaphors? Diagrams? I’ve even used physical props to tell a story in front of live audiences at conferences [this is where broad and diverse source of influences can come in handy]. Is there stock photography that sets the right tone? Do I need to get my own camera out to get the right photo for an article?
Then the piece gets published. The podcast is posted. The talk is given, recorded and uploaded to YouTube. That’s not what scratches the itch though. It’s not until I get some feedback that I’ll know if the goal was achieved. Did it make sense? Did it help someone?
A comment like, “Thanks for this, I’m going to share it with my board, I’ve been trying to explain why this should matter for months and I think this might get through to them” makes it all worth it. That’s the itch scratched for me. Even if the feedback is negative or constructive, that gets taken into consideration as I start the process all over again.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30’s and the diagnosis has really helped me understand how I need to organize my environment and my time to get things done.
There’s a Ted talk by Jason Fried called “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work” that I often share with my coworkers to help them understand why I might push back on having so many meetings, or why I block off large chunks of my calendar.
For anyone doing creative work, there’s what I think of as “overhead.” Most of us can’t get eight hours of productivity out of a day. Some of us are lucky to get an hour or two between meetings and other ‘busy’ tasks, like responding to email and finding time on the calendar for Yet Another Meeting. It takes time to set up the creative environment and get into the right headspace to be able to start creating. It often takes me a good 20 to 30 minutes to get there.
Any interruption or distraction can sideline this process and we have to go through the whole process again. I call this “switching costs.” Switching gears too many times in one day leaves your mind frazzled and burned out — the chance of getting any creative work done is gone.
Certain places work well for me. A busy coffee shop, or a seat next to some fountains provide a steady hum of noise that helps me focus. I get a TON of work done on flights [or I did, before the pandemic].
Certain times of day sometimes work — early in the morning or late at night — I find that a certain level of tiredness helps with focus for me. Caffeine actually makes it tougher to focus on creative tasks, I’m more prone to get distracted!
Certain tools help also. I bought a reMarkable Tablet, which aims to give the feel of writing on paper, but with a Kindle-like screen. It intentionally has no apps, no notifications that can distract. I can switch it on and just scribble ideas to my heart’s content, which is something I wasn’t able to do with an iPad and an Apple Pencil. The siren song of a new email, Tweet, or Slack notification is too much for me to ignore.
When I’m done producing content, writing, for example, I consider the work 50% done at most. I go back and re-read what I’ve written [often on the reMarkable Tablet] and scribble all over it. It’s common for me to cut as much as half of what I’ve written. Then I show the reduced draft to others and continue polishing from there.
The process can take a while and definitely puts me in the tortoise category, but I find it’s the only way I can work — there’s no way to ‘speed up’ this process for me and have to set expectations before I do any work with clients to ensure there’s enough time to do it right.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
This question is the stuff of nightmares for me! One of my greatest mentors once told me “perfection is the enemy of done.” It’s absolutely true, but I don’t consider myself a perfectionist. “Completionist” is a better word, perhaps? Part of my problem is that, during the creative process, I can lose sight of the big picture and get lost in details.
When your nose is pressed to the page, it’s easy to forget what “done” looks like. One of my solutions to this problem is to break the work down into parts, sections, or phases. This makes it easier to identify how far through the work I am, and makes it easy to realize when the work is truly done.
Having an outline like this also really helps to design the flow of the work also, making sure I don’t spend too much time going down any particular rabbit holes, or lose the central theme or point of the work.