I wrote this article on LinkedIn in January, 2020. I’ve updated it here in March, 2021. In 2019, I lost 50 pounds. By 2021, the total loss was 60. Many have asked me the secret, and I’ve told them all the same thing: “It’s a complicated regime: I ate…

In my last job, I struck up a conversation with the guy tasked with provisioning my mobile phone and laptop. He was working in IT support but said he really wanted to break into information security. Later, I spoke with my friend, the CISO, and…

Are you asking the right questions to determine how well your vendors will protect your data? Probably not. Let's say you own a small business, and you want to get a payroll service to help with withholding taxes and automatic deposits into your…

It’s no secret that data breaches have become so common that people tend to think, “Oh, another one,” and get on with their lives. What is surprising is how few executives of Internet companies we trust with our data have responded with better…

A human resources guy I respect said something today that really hit home: when you’re discussing corporate values, listing the word, “Integrity” is really odd — if you need to list that as a corporate value, you’re really starting behind the…

A few months ago, Ben Singleton and I wrote a piece that focused on the role of reserve officers. We had observed that two incidents in which a police officer killed an unarmed civilian in 2015 were incidents in which a reserve police officer was…

It's shockingly easy for hackers to hijack your digital life using phone numbers. The public should press Congress and carriers to improve security. Opinion contributor On July Fourth, hackers accessed computers at the social media aggregator…

Once, I was involved in an effort to break some bad habits. Among them, there had developed a cultural reliance on people who had become single points-of-failure. I say a “cultural reliance,” because one guy who had emerged as the…

The information security community is collectively and justifiedly furious over the revelations by Brian Krebs this week of an unconscionable and wholly preventable data breach by Panera Bread. Brian based his initial reporting on evidence provided…

You may have noticed a mountain of spam over the past month, telling you in breathless terms how the privacy rules are changing on every website you’ve ever visited. That’s the most obviously noticeable part of the GDPR. GDPR — it stands for General…

When I see things like someone calling the cops because a black man is wearing socks in a swimming pool, I remember why we made the @StreetCredPKIC database: so that there would be data about this. In our book based on the PKIC data, We pointed out…

Facebook’s business model is to sell information about you to advertisers, and that is how they make their money. The rule on the Internet and in publishing is and has always been that, if you can’t understand how they make money, then you are the…

As I watch the world having conniption fits over Facebook “privacy,” and discussions on the Twitters get increasingly breathless, I wonder how it is possible that people haven’t understood the value proposition provided by Facebook. Like my friends…

I’ve been arguing for years that we in information security aren’t doing anyone any favors when we demand that people use for passwords something impossible to remember, then we demand that they remember it, and then we insist that, for God’s sake,…

"I don't have ID," Floyd is saying, "they won't let me into the shelter without ID." Welcome to a Monday in the Hurst, Euless and Bedford Behavior Intervention Unit, the BIU. Floyd, a clinically depressed, 64-year-old homeless Euless man, is speaking…

As our nation reels from another mass shooting, the same conversation is being repeated: Gun-control advocates call for prescriptive controls, while gun-rights advocates argue the technicalities of those controls. And the debate stands still. It is…

Opinion contributors On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state's Sandra Bland Act, named after the black woman who was found dead in a Waller County jail cell, into law. Bland's case was a controversial one. In 2015, she was pulled over by…

(Associated Press) Everyone in the security world is worried about leaking. Last week, for instance, the U.K. government excoriated U.S. officials for leaking sensitive information about the Manchester terrorist attack. Americans, the British say,…