It’s a dangerous world out there on the internet but take heart – there’s an army that’s striving every day to keep you safe.
About 25,000 of these “soldiers” met at DEF CON 30 in Las Vegas this month and one of our own security specialists, Vince, was there with them. 👇
Unless you’re in the cyber security industry, you probably don’t know about DEF CON. It’s an annual conference where cyber security professionals convene to learn about the latest trends and meet up with like-minded individuals who are passionate about security.
The overarching theme for this year’s conference was “verify your assumptions.” In other words, don’t take surface evidence that something is doing what it claims to be doing, or that something is what it says it is.
This is a message that resonates with the participants at DEF CON because these are the type of people who see a challenge as an opportunity to dig in and use their out-of-the-box thinking to discover something that no one else has discovered.
Then they generously share their new knowledge so that everyone can be a little bit safer.
Our cyber security warriors can’t fully protect us by themselves, however. If we’re oblivious to what the enemy is trying to do to steal, kidnap, corrupt and expose our information, then the protection that we get from our diligent army is limited.
We need to be equipped as a citizen army to fight in cooperation with the professionals. We can’t open a door that they locked just because we don’t know any better. No doubt intruders are going to get in from time to time because of an error in judgment or because the bad guys are one step ahead of the good guys… for the moment.
Cyber security professionals probably don’t get the recognition or appreciation that they deserve. In fact, I know they don’t.
These are people who are content to work in the background. They’re always thinking about what could happen and what can be done to stop that from happening. They’re motivated by a deep desire to make the internet a better place.
They’re also the kind of people who put googly eyes on posters, rewire the elevator buttons at the hotel, and come up with the kind of antics that could only come from tech-geeks. But you know what they say – what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. 😉
Marty