Security | Life | Cynicism
Mailchimp is becoming annoying. The formatting has a mind of its own, almost as bad as MS word circa 95, when if you tried inserting a picture it would split all your content into 17 different pages. It's why getting this newsletter out in a timely and regular basis is difficutlt.
So, if anyone has any alternate suggestions, I'm all ears. Thank you.
|
|
Security | Life | Cynicism
Security is all down to fake fronts in this episode - more specifically, how do you know that the security company you just contracted isn't a front for criminals?
FIN7 created a front company doing business as Combi Security. It bills itself as a pen testing company based in Moscow, Russia and Haifa, Israel. They hired skilled individuals telling them they would be involved in legitimate pen-testing of client computer networks. Making it a security version of some kind of money mule.
Then we had the case of Italian company CloudEyE which is believed to have made more than $500,000 from selling it binary crypter to malware gangs. Following the report published by Check Point which exposed the company, it seems like CloudEyE has shut down. <plays a tiny violin>
Finally, we had the case of an obscure Indian firm which operated out of a nondescript office above a small tea shop in New Delhi which offered its hacking services to help clients spy on more than 10,000 email accounts over a period of seven years. OK, this one wasn't so much of a front - but they did still try to position themselves as a somewhat 'legit' business. Helping private investigators tempted towards the darkside.
You can't trust anyone these days can you? I wish I had some deep insights to share with you - but all I can say is due diligence is really important.
|
|
Security | Life | Cynicism
In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less Alex Soojung-Kim Pang looks at the relationship between working hours, skill development and productivity.
As Pang notes, many of history’s most productive people, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, worked surprisingly short hours, while several studies have indicated that around four hours of work per day is optimal.
One of these studies, which was led by Anders Ericsson and looked at the practicing habits of elite violinists, formed the basis of Malcolm Gladwell’s argument (laid out in his book ‘Outliers’) that it takes around 10,000 hours of practice to become an elite performer in any endeavour. However, this rule represents a simplified interpretation of the original study, notably overlooking two key points:
Only 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (in which people engage in a structured manner with full concentration and focus, pursuing clear goals and receiving feedback that helps them to spot ways to improve) is sufficient to reach mastery.
Deliberate practice can be gruelling, requires significant levels of sacrifice and may not be immediately rewarding, so can only be sustained if driven by a compelling motivator.
Given the nature of deliberate practice, it can only realistically be sustained for a limited period each day (up to around four hours), and in excess leads to injury or burnout. While approaches vary from person to person, Ericsson found that the optimal pattern often involves working for sessions of 80-90 minutes, with 30 minute breaks, and concentrating these in the morning. It therefore takes around a decade to amass the required amount of deliberate practice to reach expert level.
As Pang notes, such findings run counter to prevalent beliefs about productivity, noting that:
‘This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to fixate on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance look only at what students do in the gym or practice room. Everybody concentrates on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance and your life.
This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.’
|
|
Security | Life | Cynicism
In perhaps the greatest cross-over since Magnum PI teamed up with Murder She Wrote (don't @me Marvel fans) - our very own Thom Langford, one of my co-presenters on the Host Unknown podcast was invited as a guest onto the Smashing Security podcast, undeniably the second best security podcast out there.
But the story doesn't end there - Smashing Security offered to be a sponsor of the Host Unknown Podcast.
It takes me back to 1997 Macworld in Boston where Steve Jobs announced Microsoft as a partner.
Stay secure my friends
|
|
|
|
