Adam Firestone is the Editor-in-Chief of United States Cybersecurity Magazine as well as a member of the Security Industry Association’s Cyber Advisory Board. Mr. Firestone has more than 22 years of experience in the security, defense, intelligence, and government contracting industries. He is an accomplished solutions architect, senior engineering executive with experience in advanced cryptology and identity management technologies, has led a cybersecurity organization, and the defense and federal subsidiary of a global Cloud-native middleware company. Mr. Firestone has a patented invention for ensuring multi-level data security. Additionally, Mr. Firestone is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He graduated from Yale University, is a former United States Army officer, and also possesses a legal background, having practiced law in New York.
Hello, I had an interesting conversation not too long ago with a well-respected Washington, DC think tank’s cybersecurity duumvirate. Apologies ahead of time for my use of asides to you, the audience. But what’s cybersecurity if one can’t get a little Shakespearian from time to time? Hint – my asides are in italics. And, while … Read more
Hello, Tell me the truth. Am I the only one, who, upon learning about the Solar Winds breach, was humming a Whitesnake song from 1982? As the song says: Here I go again on my own Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known While the jury’s still out on whether I’m a drifter, if … Read more
Hello, This Fall 2020 issue brings us around to another National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) describes NCSAM’s goal as raising “awareness about the importance of cybersecurity across our Nation, ensuring that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online.” That’s a … Read more
Epidemiology, with respect to public health, is often used as an analogy when discussing cybersecurity. The two are strikingly similar, encompassing notions of impacted populations, specialist expertise, containment, and cure. Education is acknowledged as a primary means of reducing epidemiological risk, especially with respect to HIV/AIDS.1 It has this effect by generating an ability to … Read more
Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen paints a damning picture of an industry dedicated to a profitable but harmful product line. With each successive product generation, the extent of the damage caused by reliance on the product grows, driving purchases of … Read more
Hello, Albert Einstein is widely reputed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. While Einstein never actually uttered these words, they are a useful illustration of much of what happens across the American cybersecurity community. Breached? Conventional wisdom says that the root cause is … Read more
Information security cultural iconography focuses on heroic and demonic archetypes, resulting in a pageant of evocative, emotional imagery that influences reportage, regulation, acquisition, enterprise governance, and the choices made by individuals with respect to their digital personae. The angels (in the epic struggle in the wires between good and evil) are the network defenders. They … Read more
Hello, As Cassius said to Brutus in Act I, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” And so it is with the American cybersecurity community writ large. At the risk of igniting the fires of controversy, it’s time to draw a line in the … Read more
Security is inherently binary, like being alive or being married. Just as you can’t be “almost married” or “almost alive” (Schrodinger’s cat notwithstanding), you can’t be “mostly secure.”. There’s no way to create a solution that will permit compromise only by certain entities under certain carefully delineated circumstances while defeating all other malicious access attempts. … Read more
Hello, At the beginning of 2019, the American cybersecurity community finds itself at a crossroads. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to say that cybersecurity policymakers, technologists, and practitioners find themselves fighting a battle on two fronts. On one side, there’s the traditional hostile cyberspace. We expect this. We’ve trained for this. We’ve built for … Read more
