Cybersecurity articles from someone who ran security for a national retailer for two decades and passed every audit. Real talk on what protects a business and what just looks like protection, from the infrastructure side where the actual work happens.
CybersecurityEvery article in this series was secretly about security. The capstone: why the green checkmark is a component and not a defense, what a working posture looks like in practice, and the five questions no product can answer.
Attack SurfaceI was never a CISO by title; my networking partner and I were both directors who, with a boss who was not security savvy, functioned as a de facto CISO together, setting the rules and getting them approved. The job…
Access ControlMost security tools are theater. I sat through endless vendor pitches for products with giant dashboards full of blinking widgets that looked impressive and did almost nothing. The attack surface is enormous, phones, laptops, servers, cloud, even charging cables, and…
CybersecurityThe human layer is the biggest security weakness and the one people are least prepared for, because they do not expect the guy in the uniform, or the friendly caller, to be the attacker. You can harden every server and…
CompliancePassing an audit and being secure are not the same thing; companies that treat compliance as a checklist get breached at the same rate as those that ignore it. Real protection comes from documentation that reflects how the business actually…
BackupsCoffee in hand, you open an email demanding $500 in Bitcoin to unlock your photos, tax records, and three-year novel, and yesterday's urgent delivery notice was the invitation. It happens thousands of times a day, and the habits that stop…
ComplianceThe regulatory documents are the standards your security program has to satisfy, and most teams never realize they are working from a version that expired. Finding and reading the right ones is half the compliance battle. Here is how to…
Access ControlSecurity is mostly dull work nobody wants to do, patching, access reviews, backups, and it is also the entire job. Two decades in, the one time everything broke, it was backups that saved us, barely: a triple failure, snapped tapes,…
BackupsAttackers rarely come through the firewall; if they do, you were sloppy, because the firewall is the easy part. The real vectors are social engineering and the insider, and the insider is the most common and most overlooked. Two decades…
CISOI wrote a company's security policies against NIST CSF and 800-53, and now I ghostwrite books for the leaders who do this work. Most policy documents fail for two reasons: nobody knows who owns each step, and nobody knows which…
CISOI ran PCI compliance at a national retailer for twenty years and passed every audit, then started ghostwriting books for the security leaders who live this work. Here is what nobody admits: passing an audit and being secure are not…
CybersecurityTequila and Tech Talk was a virtual roundtable series co-hosted by Richard Lowe (The Writing King) and Natan Verkhovsky (Alura Creative Agency). It
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