April 14, 2008 - Volume 3, #35

Good Morning:
Ah, can you smell it? It's the smell of spring, not of a steaming brown bag [1]. Of course, spring usually means spring cleaning. Some of my friends have spouses who like to do the garage spring cleaning every other week, but not the Boss. We wade through the crap we've accumulated through the year right about the time of the neighborhood garage sale. That's a great time to take a look at the stuff that the kids never play with anymore, and get rid of it.

Of course, once you indicate you are getting rid of something, the kids all of a sudden become smitten with it again. But that's the way it works, I guess.

I forgot the power of doing a spring cleaning on my computer as well. Since the hard drive on my MacBook was DOA, I needed to rebuild the machine over the weekend. I put a 250 GB drive in, reinstalled the OS and started building the machine. Rather than just do what I always do, I used this downtime to figure out what I needed and clean things up a bit.

I'm happy to say, my backup "system" worked like a champ. I took an old 60GB drive and loaded up all my data files from my desktop iMac (including my Parallels VM images). Within an hour, all my data was restored.

Then it was just about reinstalling all the applications. I did only the stuff that was really necessary. Of course, it was still about 20 different apps and utilities, but overall I think the restore took me a couple of hours - as I was doing a bunch of other things around the house. No lost data. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Yes, I got lucky. But there also was some planning involved - amazingly enough.

So now it's on to important stuff, like wading through my notes and follow-ups from RSA. That will take me a bulk of the day, as well as the things I should have been doing last week - if it weren't for the demise of my hard drive.

If I ran into you last week, it was great to see you. I always enjoy running into old friends and making some new ones. I got some great feedback on the work I'm doing. Thanks so much for the positive feedback. Believe it or not, it helps. And I even ran into some folks that bought the P-CSO and seemed to like it.

I'm just happy no one slugged me in the head. I tend to have that effect on people, though I am mellowing out a bit. Although my liver may tell a different story.

Have a great day.

Photo: "spring cleaning 1" originally uploaded by animakitty [2]

Technorati: Information Security [3], CSO [4],Security Mike [5], Internet Security [6]

[7] The Pragmatic CSO: Available Now! Read the Intro and Get "5 Tips to be a Better CSO" www.pragmaticcso.com [8]

Get Your Special Report: 6 Easy Steps to Protect Your Identity and get access to Security Mike's Portal today www.securitymike.com [9] [10]

Top Security News

Art's [11] and also John Thompson's [12] (which I did see). Actually, the answer is $300,000. That's the going rate for a sponsorship with a keynote attached. That's a lot of coin to say nothing. Art's big thing was Information Risk Management and not being Dr. No. Ho hum. We all know it's about storage + security. The guy works for EMC, after all. As I mentioned last week, there is nothing new. Or not much anyway.  John Thompson was all about "Information Centric Security." HA! I can't wait for Hoff to get JT to hold up a sign saying he copied the Hoff. And if you think I was sitting around for luminaries like Val Rahmani and Gene Hodges to wax poetically why their companies still matter - you are nuts. But alas, I seemed to be the only one of this opinion, since the keynote halls were PACKED. I had a hard time even getting a seat. Unbelievable.
Link to this [13]

this [14]

this [15]

Top Blog Postings

http://www.cigital.com/justiceleague/2008/03/31/how-do-companies-address-security-testing/
[16]Link to this [17]

http://techbuddha.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/is-the-cure-costlier-than-the-disease/ [18]
Link to this [19]

http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/it/2007/12/11/whitepaper-measuring-the-return-on-it-security-investments [20]
Link to this [21]