If you’ve spent this past workweek furiously trying to figure where I’d wind up for this installment of Tech Essentials (and hopefully win your office betting pool), you can now put your pencils down because I’ve arrived in Pisa, Italy.
Armand here again—this time from Langley, VA, home of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Why am I hanging out near the HQ of the world’s foremost spy organization? To make a point about how cybercrime vs cybersecurity is very much a cat and mouse, spy vs. spy affair.
Got a billion-dollar IT budget? Got the best Microsoft cybersecurity tools money can buy? Got teams and teams of IT staff who proactively monitor lights blinking on servers and charts on screens looking for cybercriminal activity within your network?
Dr. Suess created that grey fuzzy-haired creature many years ago, the Grinch, who stole Christmas. While not quite as cute and fuzzy as the Grinch, today’s cybercriminals are posing as a similar sounding nefarious activity, the Glitch.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." This quote attributed to Socrates, while controversial, underscores the importance of humility in our quest for knowledge.
Where are most of the US Military’s secrets and not so secrets ending up? Not in one of the cybercriminal hotbed countries, but in the ancient trading post on the trans-Saharan caravan route, the city of Timbuktu.
Alexander Pope famously wrote, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” It’s usually a nice, refined thing to say to someone when you screw up—the implication is that people make mistakes, and to look past those mistakes is an uncommonly gracious thing to do.
With July 4th in the rear-view mirror, we’re now in peak summer season, which means baseball season. (I happen to love baseball and equate it with long summer nights, hot dogs, sprinklers, and days off from school.)
Now there’s another common syndrome in the working world that I’d like to shed a light on: “Payment Paranoia”.
It’s summer now, and you’re going to be headed on a nice vacation soon. You’re putting together all your to-do lists so you can truly escape from the office without anyone bothering you. About a week out from your big trip, you ask your colleague, Jerry, to cover for you on some key accounts. Jerry, being the mensch that he is, agrees. After crafting that clever out-of-office reply, you’re now ready to send over your login credentials to Jerry who happens to work remotely in Tashkent.
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