Skip to main content

Book: Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schenier


"There is a fundamental difference between crashing your computer and losing your spreadsheet data, and crashing your pacemaker and losing your life," 

Blog Post

If you follow me across the web, you know I deeply distrust the Internet of Things. In making things easier for the non-techie, having simple or non existent security options makes them - and everyone else - more at risk for cybercrime.

I finished my Security+ book and read Click Here to Kill Everybody.





Schenier doesn't only break down how the IoT is the wild west of consumer products - There's a lot of regulations that fail to become law because, well, why bother changing it? Our data is continually at risk and companies do not care about it - and neither do we.

Target had a data breach - Do you still shop there? Will your next vacation be at Marriott after 500 million users had their data compromised? Probably. Did their systems fail predictably, safely? My bet is no.

You may say "The government implementing laws can't solve all the problems" and you would not be wrong.

Interconnected networks were built on shoddy protocols - Protocols that have updates and upgrades that are not widely implemented because it would cost too much to retool protocols that we have used for 30 years, and companies do not want to pay for that.

"We also tell them to not insert strange USB drives into their computers. Again, what else would you possibly do with a USB drive? We have to do better: we need systems that remain secure regardless of which links people click on, and regardless of which USB drives they stick into their computers."

Schenier pushes education on all levels, technologists and policy makers working closely together on what's feasible and what isn't, and encouraging people who want to enter the Cybersecurity field. With breaches everywhere you turn and a growing presence of the internet in our refrigerators, it should not be as hard as it is to break into the IT field.


It's a great, informative read with lots of footnotes and links to articles and resources that I will probably end up reading and writing about here, so please pay for the book and give it a read.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, ...

Log Sorting with AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights

 The cool thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See these links to go to the DataDog and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     CloudWatch     The syntax is odd, but easy to grasp. Sort log data by IP addresses, message codes, and status codes. The simplest query system, but not quite robust.   Insights       The syntax has changed - Vastly. I see major SQL influences. You can see that in how the parse function works - in this case, it's often taken pieces of a pre-existing standard - in this case, message - and breaking them into their own c...

Infracost, The Cloud Cost Manager

I nfracost integrates with Infrastructure as Code technologies to check the costs of the infrastructure you're creating or changing, in multiple currencies, multiple cloud platforms, and can integrate with multiple repos and pull requests.  Hooray!   The single-sentence description is 'Shift FinOps Left". Not sure what that means, but let's look at the software itself. The tag policies feature seems similar to the regulations one can set up in Trivy, like I've done over here , to make Terraform code adhere to certain rules. I installed it via chocolatey on Windows 11, using it to check my Azure resources. Don't forget to get the API key as well, it is a lot easier to set up than you think, and used the CLI in the program; here's that documentation (Option 1) . It does not check the free tiers of Azure and uses On-Demand prices by default. This is the output for infracost breakdown ;  You'll notice that it does round down; My cost is 15.41$, and the t...