I'm not supersticious by nature, but I know a lot of people who are, and today holds special significance for them. On a regular day you'll see all manner of craziness - people avoiding black cats, knocking on wood, throwing salt over their shoulders, etc, but today is a special day of super craziness. You'll even find people who won't leave the house for fear of some terrible fate befalling them. What's to stop the house collapsing on them though? If your number is up, it's up isn't it? Wrong place, wrong time. Call it fate, call it bad luck, but one thing is guaranteed - s%#t happens at seemingly random intervals to random people.
All this talk of craziness got me thinking about parallels in network security. Is Black Tuesday the security equivalent of Friday 13th? Is that a day that raises our awareness of all the bad things that could happen, before breathing a sigh of relief that fate hasn't slapped us in the face yet? I'm actually amazed at the number of security and networking professionals that I talk to who privately admit to concerns over obvious holes and vulnerabilities in their Enterprise security defences and methodologies. For most of these people there is some good reason (political, budgetary, resourcing, etc) why they make do with flying under the radar, but Lady Luck has taken a vacation from Enterprise security and she's not expected back anytime soon. The number of data breaches in Enterprises is increasing at an exponential rate. Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself. It's really time to face up to our fears and admit that they are a reality, and that we can tip the balance of fate in our favor, and still leave the house.
So maybe superstition is a good state of mind. Maybe it's a state of preparedness that we should all adopt. Maybe I'm the crazy one for not expecting to be hit by a bus the minute I walk outside the front door. Well, I'll certainly continue to pay close attention to the state of security in the Enterprise, but it's too nice a day to stay indoors. I think I'll stroll down to AT&T and buy myself one of those new fangled iPhones and really give our security engineers a challenge. More on that next time.....
//Dom
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