Recently, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Julia Kerrigan, an articulate and insightful young journalist writing for her high school paper, The Dart. In my mind (that’s foreshadowing the challenges caused by my ego-centricity dear reader), the point of the conversation was for me to provide Julia with a primer on information privacy and security issues so that she could weave into her article a few observations from a so-called expert.
Taking and running with my misplaced cue, I launched into lawyer-mode and began describing the beach ball of state and federal privacy and security laws (see my previous post if you don’t get the drift), offering a litany of sophisticated cyber attacks by the bad guys, analyzing their smash-and-grab and dollar-driven motives, and deconstructing their baiting, phishing and spoofing techniques. I then headed off on a frolic and detour of high and low tech solutions to keep the bad guys out of IT systems, desktops, laptops and tablets. With all that accomplished in my 45-minute-non-stop-caffeine-fueled-and-sleep-deprived monologue, I was mistakenly feeling pretty good about myself and my command of the subject matter. My Emily Litella moment occurred when, after I paused for a breath, Julia mentioned that that all her audience really needed were just a few pointers on how they might keep out of cybersecurity trouble. Oh, never mind …
If you’d like to see how Julia made lemonade out of my lemons, please take a look at her delightful article, Defending Data.