Month: January 2017

Infosec Skills Gap

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Ricoh Danielson is a U.S. Army Combat Veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and founder of (Fortitude Tech LLC). Problem statement:

There is a huge demand for infosec professionals but at the same time, many aspiring security personnel are unemployed and left to the wind due to the fact that employers and companies don’t allow them to obtain the skills needed through on-the-job training. This is what some refer to as the “skills gap.”

It's not just the novices that are suffering through this. Many experienced workers who are looking to learn a new area of infosec are also caught in this trap. Solution statement:

Noting this gap, I took the initiative to start up EXXOTeck Training out of San Jose. There, I am bridging the gap for underemployed, unemployed, and/or learning adults who are seeking to gain real-life skill sets in cyber security. In line with market demands, we’re providing hands-on experience by bringing in world-leading experts from Cisco, AWS and other services providers to help students connect the dots.

The industry needs much more of this.

These hands-on experiences can range anywhere from creating a network and peer-conducted penetration testing to studying companies and reviewing their defensive postures. Many times, students will find themselves in a scenario where they are either conducting a security assessment or acting as a CEO. Consequently, students can learn what it means to do the job of a cyber security professional and to know what overall business impact this type of work might have.

Tuesday Photo Challenge - Animals

The Tuesday Photo Challenge is a weekly theme-based challenge for photographers of all kinds to share both new and old photography. #fpj-photo-challenge

The Tuesday Photo Challenge is a weekly theme-based challenge for photographers of all kinds to share both new and old photography. This week's theme is animals

The only animals I saw this week were a deer that ran across the road while on the way to the office and the squirrel running across the road while coming back from getting my hair cut. It's winter here. The animals are in hiding. It's dark when I leave home on my commute to work. It's still dark when I leave the office to come home for dinner. I get most of my photography done on the weekend. And this weekend was dark and damp.

These particular animals shown here are family. My sister-in-law's husband -- the bigger animal in the photo -- is celebrating his 40th year of his birth. The little animals lined up to ensure the were awarded a share of the sugared dough covered with colored sugar. It was like watching lions hunt. The little ones are my wife's cousin nephews. That's a way of saying it's her two first cousin's kids. I am not sure who the ladies in the right background are, but they are the family of family.

The one lady in the middle background is my wife. Sometimes she thing I small like an animal.

Yes, human beings are animals. Some would say the most dangerous ones on the planet. We kill for sport. We eat more than we need to sustain our bodies. We take what we want from the earth and give nothing back. We are more like viruses.

Reading List - Populism, Votes for Women, and Resetting Trumps Counter

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James Shelly:

Ramadan’s talk was titled Creating Thriving Societies in Troubling Times. His thesis: embedded in the core of every ideology, philosophy, culture, and religion is a single, underlying ambition: peace. This animating, common principle is the hope of living in peace with one’s self and with the outside world. Ramadan calls it the ‘intimate universal.’ The idea here is that Tariq Ramadan (a Muslim) and myself (a person who can’t make any sense of beliefs in unfalsifiable deities) still share something essential in common. At the end of our respective logic trails, we end up aiming the same destination: a desire for peace within ourselves and our world. What gets us into trouble is ‘othering’: failing to recognize the common humanity — the ‘intimate universal’ — in one another. When a population fails to acknowledge the humanity of another population, the certain result is victimhood: they took our jobs; they are changing our society; they don’t follow our customs; they, them, those people… At scale, like a virus, this attitude snowballs into populism. “Populism is victimhood,” says Ramadan. And such mass victimhood manifests itself in a agenda to oppress, silence, and control someone else — specifically another group of someones. Popularism is victimhood

Andy Ihnatko:

And when I say VOTES FOR WOMEN, I’m also thinking Votes for people with non-European ancestors Votes for naturalized citizens and people with immigrant parents Votes for people whose ancestors were already here before any of the above came along Votes for people with disabilities Votes for LGTBQ people (and any letters I might have left out, in my ignorance) Votes for non-Christians Votes for people who’ve been personally affected (i.e., themselves or someone close to them) by poverty or homelessness Votes for people who’ve been personally affected by mental illness Votes for people who’ve been personally affected by chronic or terminal illness Votes for people who’ve been personally affected by chemical dependency Votes for people who are, were, or are family members of: teachers, police officers, firefighters, military, and any other career that involves giving much to society and receiving too little in return Really young people, especially if they want to join Congress because of the healthcare benefits Really old people, assuming that they weren’t in there already; same reason Vote for Women

Daniel Miessler:

Trump is coming in and the liberals seem committed to try and convict him before he starts on Monday. Indeed it would be reciprocal, so there’s a pleasant symmetry in that. But thermonuclear war has a similar symmetry as well, and similar outcomes. It’s clear that Trump deserves any opposition he receives. The tones of racism, sexism, and disregard for truth were consistent throughout his ascendancy. But as the holders of these pitchforks we have options, and we’d be well-served to evaluate them before the chants and fires begin. Could we prosecute his previous offenses at every turn? Yes. Would we be justified in this? Probably. But those aren’t the right questions. The right questions center around what anyone gets out of the approach. The counter for Trump’s previous infractions sits at 3,278. I kept track. And in some world the best thing to do would be to make him pay for every single one. But we don’t live in that world. We gain nothing by emulating the GOP in a commitment to oppose his every move. At least not yet. What I propose is very simple. We reset the counter. On Monday it drops to zero. Reset Trump's Counter