Meta: Comments now hosted at Intense Debate

I've set up the comments to use the Intense Debate system. This will add threading, a degree of cross-site identity continuity, and a number of other features to the system.

Security Without Tears or Apology

In plugging this blog, for which I’m grateful, Avedon Carol mentioned that my subtitle “Security without apology or tears” doesn’t necessarily make immediate sense. I thought I’d spend some time talking about that.

Every time I tell someone I do information security for a living,

The lights come on, the set is down, the curtains float away...

People already blog about information security – just look at my short but growing blog roll. Does the world really need one more? I think so, and my inaugural post is to make the case for it.

Information Security is big business. The U.S. federal government alone spent 7.1 billion dollars on it in 2009, and private industry dropped a pretty penny on it as well. The headlines regularly show the cost of not getting it right, literally and figuratively. Companies appoint executives, staff departments, allocate budgets, and do all the other things that businesses do in order to secure their computing. I should know – it’s kept me employed full time for most of my adult life.

And yet, the headlines keep coming.