Fighting the good infosec fight...and shooting ourselves in the foot.
Working in IT security is great - a dynamic industry that brings continual innovation, growth and a fundamental importance to everyone's lives. It's become essential stuff, on the news every week (normally for bad reasons inevitably) but even the clichéd 'man on the street' understands many of the basics of keeping our data safe. Except when sharing his holiday on Facebook, but that one is probably here to stay.
As an industry, however, we've still got lots of work to do. There is probably a lot of cynicism out there, with unreliable solutions, no straight answers and the legacy of the IT salesman (that one's probably not going away either). We need to drive our professionalism, and deliver effective solutions that produce real world benefits for organisations and customers. We need to help keep consumers data safe, without compromising the benefits that big data, open networks and continual connectivity are delivering us.
Certainly, we could do without shooting ourselves in the foot. There's been a few high profile examples:
RSA asks for plaintext Twitter passwords on conference reg page
Not great, of course, on many levels. It's not isolated - major IT vendors getting hacked, duped or compromised (RSA, LastPass, TalkTalk) is a far to far regular thing. It will happen though, just as any industry will suffer major own goals as mistakes and accidents do happen.
The most important part is that we seem have so far to go to get the message over to that man in the street (who's now clicking a link that will net him an amazing discount on some RayBans, or the lottery winners who's sharing their winnings on Facebook). Whether it's the complex tech, the problems we cause ourselves or the overload of bad news in the media, the message isn't getting through. And 'normal' people are those in power - whether an MP moved into a role looking over tech after another random cabinet reshuffle, or the CEO who is now looking losing 5% of her turnover after a huge data loss that new legislation could impose. Bad news is arguably our business, but that needs to be balanced with the amazing results we do achieve, and continuous education on IT security to everyone.
Oh, and remember to change your passwords regularly ;-)