Author Archives: Josh Bressers

How do we talk to the regular people? What’s going to motivate them? What matters to them? You can easily make the case that business is driven by financial rewards, but what can we say or do to get normal people to understand us, to care? Money? Privacy? Donuts? I’m not saying we’re going to turnContinue reading “How do we talk to normal people?”

How many times have you tried to get buyin for a security idea at work, or with a client, only to have them say “no”. Even though you knew it was really important, they still made the wrong decision. We’ve all seen this more times than we can count. We usually walk away grumbling aboutContinue reading “How do we talk to business?”

Anytime there’s some sort of vacuum, something will appear to fill the gap. In this context we’re going to look at what’s filling the vacuum in security. There are a lot of smart people, but we’re failing horribly at getting our message out. The answer to this isn’t simple. You have to look at what’sContinue reading “What’s filling the vacuum?”

The security people are currently losing the battle to win the hearts and minds of the people. The war is far from over but it’s not currently looking good for our team. As with all problems, if there is a vacuum, something or someone end up filling it. This is happening right now in security.Continue reading “We’re losing the battle for security”

One the hardest things we have to do is to build trust. It’s not hard for everyone, just us specifically. It’s not in our nature. Security people tend not to trust anyone. Everything we do is based on not trusting anyone, it’s literally our job. Trust is a two way street. If you expect someoneContinue reading “How to build trust”

We can’t. You think you can, but you can’t. This reminds of the Feynman video where he’s asked how magnets work and he doesn’t explain it, he explains why he can’t explain it. Our problem is we’re generally too clever to know when to stop. There are limits to our cleverness unfortunately. I’m picking on bufferContinue reading “How can we describe a buffer overflow in common terms?”

Sometimes it’s really hard to be nice to someone. This is especially true if you think they’re not very smart. Respect is a two way street though. If you think someone’s an idiot, they probably think you’re an idiot. You’re both going to end up right once it’s all over though. As an industry weContinue reading “Being a nice security person”

How many times have you been afraid to say something about security because you knew if you’re wrong, you’re going to be destroyed in public about it by your peers? How many times did you try really hard to completely discredit someone who said something wrong about security? How many times have you been wrongContinue reading “Everyone is afraid of us”

You’re probably bad at talking to people. I don’t mean your friends you play D&D or Halo or whatever hip game people play now, I mean humans, like the guy who serves you coffee in the morning. We’ve all had more than once instance where we said something and ended up with a room fullContinue reading “You are bad at talking to people”