If you had a choice between doctors to perform surgery on you, which would you pick:  a doctor who has sat through training on how to perform an appendectomy; or assurance that your doctor will successfully perform your appendectomy? The answer seems obvious, but on the topic of dealing effectively with human vulnerabilities in cybersecurity, most of us seem satisfied with “awareness training.”  It’s a check-the-box response to regulatory compliance or client demands.   Sign everyone up for…

I had a nagging worry that something was wrong with my car, so I finally decided to take it to the dealer.  I couldn’t exactly describe my concern, except there was an intermittent, “funny noise” coming from somewhere in the front end.  An unscrupulous dealer would have taken me down a long path of parts replacement, beginning with tires, then wheels, then tie rods, and on and on, perhaps never fixing the real problem.  Fortunately,…

How time flies.  Seventeen years ago, I went to work for a small, visionary company based in Seattle—Computer Forensics, Inc.   Indeed, the founder was so early in the e-discovery and forensics industry that our URL was forensics.com.  Laptop drives typically had 8 GB of storage, and servers were more often than not simply a bigger box that sat in a closet. Lots has changed since then.  New technologies, expanded data sources and media types, and…

It’s 4:20 p.m. on Friday.  You’re looking forward to meeting your friends soon for happy hour at the local bar.  Your boss is on vacation, and you’re caught up for the week.  All is well.  As you take one last look at your email, you see a message has just arrived from one of your suppliers – marked URGENT.  The supplier is ranting about why you didn’t send payment for last month’s invoice to the right bank…

We’re addicted to information, but we can’t stand to think about it again once we’ve seen it, saved it, hoarded it.  Why?  We collect or create it in the moment, but have no thought or plan for its future.  Even when it was once and briefly useful, neglected information soon becomes the effluvium of our digital landfills.  And, like most landfills, the odor is disagreeable and no one wants to be near it. Pinterest and…

Hurricane season is in full swing.  As I write this, Tropical Storm Emily is drenching Florida, and the governor has declared a state of emergency.  Having lived in Florida myself, I know that most coastal residents do take hurricanes seriously.  There are always those, however, who either don’t grasp the possibility that if a hurricane hits they can suffer real damage, or simply play the odds that it won’t happen to them.  Hurricane readiness for…