Limitless

I witnessed 2 clients get hit with ransomware 2016. At the time I was somewhat familiar with cybersecurity; I knew about firewalls, VPN access, mobile device management and password management, but not much else.

I remember emailing one of them that week…he was brief,

“can’t talk…ransomware”

I finally got him on the phone a few days later and he was understandably stressed out of his mind and worried about his job. They chose not to pay the ransom, but instead spent multiple six figures on incident response and all new equipment.

Data was lost. Time was lost. Reputation was damaged. But luckily, he kept his job. I’m not so sure the result would be the same today.

At first I felt helpless

I wished I could have done something to help him, but I was merely perceived as the friendly neighborhood account manager for a company that most people equally hate to love & love to hate; AT&T.

• I was limited by my own beliefs.
• Other people’s perceptions of me became my reality.
• I was the only obstacle holding myself back from being who I wanted to be.

I needed immediate change

When I realized this it was motivating. I felt determined. A fresh desire to learn, grow, and adapt came over me. So I naturally leaned into it.

You gotta understand, I came from a room full of people and an industry that is mostly stagnant; telecom. Some things change sure, but on the grand scheme, everyone I left behind at AT&T is doing the same things today they were doing then (if you’re reading this AT&T folks, I’m not firing shots, just being honest).

In 2017 I took meetings with backup and disaster recovery providers making all sorts of anti-ransomware claims.

I was blown away by how easily avoidable the damage form these attacks seemed to be. I didn’t know if it was true or just really deceptive marketing.

Next I created a podcast (”Dialedin”) and interviewed 40+ IT Pros - a mix of CISOs, CIOs, & IT Directors - they showed me the client side of cybersecurity and provided more value to me than I think I was able to return.

My passion for cyber gained traction. I jumped into the deep end and have found myself in some of the most interesting tech conversations I never imagined having.

It was all worth it

Fast forward to 2019. A ransomware event was detected at an active client of mine. The disaster recovery system we had in place automatically rolled back to an hour prior to the event and nothing happened.

No significant data loss. No significant disruption. No reputation damage. It was boring.

Boring is a good thing in cyber.

By becoming better ourselves, we can better serve those around us.

Remove your limiting beliefs. Destroy other people’s perceptions of you.

Adapt Faster

Midjourney art by Scarlett

Prompt:

/imagine?sparkle, unicorn, koala bear that can’t reach a leaf and it wants to eat it, hungry worried ultra realistic technology --ar 3:2