Coming Out of the “Cave”

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by Trish Smith As recently as five years ago, if you worked for the tech department of most organizations, your job responsibilities were pretty clear-cut.  You were expected to fix the hardware when it broke, “fix” the software when someone crashed a program, and install updates and software as necessary. The skills required were cut-and-dry, [...]

A Multipart Letter to Employers of Security Professionals

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by Andrew Hay My name is Andrew Hay and I, like many of my colleagues, work for an organization in an information security function. What I’d like to impress upon you is the need for organizations to support the continuous learning of their employed security staff. The field of security is a constantly evolving entity [...]

Gaining and Maintaining Professional Momentum During Difficult Times

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by David McCartney While I’ve always been blessed with employment, I haven’t always been given opportunities to advance my career and myself through the employer. During professional dry spells that can result from economic or job limitations, it can be a major challenge to gain or maintain your professional momentum. Knowing how to leverage affordable, [...]

Technophobe, or something more?

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by Trish Smith Why do people fail to address security issues? We use the word “technophobe” to describe people who are leery and sometimes fearful of technology, but this is a misleading over-generalization. I believe there is another issue at work. We use highly specialized language, or lingo, in many areas, including information security. To [...]

Online Security for Kids: How the New York Times article got it wrong

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By Trish Smith On January 13, 2009, the New York Times ran an article by Brad Stone on their website entitled, “Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown.” In this article, the Mr. Stone discussed a recent report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (a task force created by 49 state attorneys general to [...]

The key to successful organizational change

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By Trish Smith The recent activity in the economy has brought to the public’s attention some controversial issues regarding how organizations change (or in this case, how they don’t). The 700 billion dollar bailout (just for a start) of the financial and automotive industries has focused the spotlight on a very specific issue in the [...]