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Our Blogs Open Sauce Talking security with Bruce Almighty | Talking security with Bruce Almighty |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 01 February 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 6 So there's no single incident, person, group of people or group of incidents that focused your mind on this type of career? Not really. I mean, security is something you're born with. I think as a kid, you walk around thinking, "how could I shoplift here" or you walk into the nursery with your mother and ask, "how could I cheat here?". It's something you just think about as you walk around. It's a way of looking at the world. It's always easier to teach the domain expertise, whether it's cryptography or computer security or crime to someone who has the mindset of a security guy. It's just a way of looking at the world. And I always had it. You think anybody can be directed towards that kind of career? I think so. I mean, if they have that mindset, then yes. If they don't, it'll always be a struggle. You have to think like an attacker. You have to think like a security person. There are a large number of security experts in the US - all learned, all well-known, but nobody is able to relate to the public the way you have. Why? I think I'm just good at it. Even at college and in my part-time jobs, a lot of what I would do would be communicating between tech and non-tech. And I think it's a matter of being able to understand technology and being able to communicate that. They're skills, completely different skills; if you have one, you often don't have the other. I just think I'm lucky that I'm able to do both, that I'm able to understand the technology and the non-technology. So I can talk between the two worlds. Would you put this down to a basic gift of yours, or would you say you have cultivated it? I think it's a bit of both. I have a bit of trouble knowing the difference between something you work on and something you're born with. It's certainly something I've worked on - certainly my later books are better than my earlier books; my later writings are better than my earlier writings. I think I've always liked to do it, it's something I thought was important. It's something I've always been good at but as you do anything you get better at it, so I think it's a combination. In your talk at the conference you focused on the fact that information is going to be the major way to make people genuinely more secure - as long as they understand the information they're getting. Let's take the Linux conference - people don't make much of an effort to make it known to the public that there's even a conference going on. So would you say there's some level of information dissemination which needs to start right here? I think we all do. Especially those who of us understand security, we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it rationally. There's so much fear, there's so much politics. There's so much irrational thinking, that I think all of us that understand the issues need to talk about them. Now whether I drag people to a Linux conference depends on the programming and there are certainly conferences for technical people only. But the more people that talk about this differently, the better we are. I always feel that I should give people language, to go out into the real world and talk about things. I do this in my writings about privacy and security and terrorism. I'm speaking to the converted; I'm not convincing anybody with my writing. What I'm doing is giving my readers language, so that they can go talk to other people. That way, what I say multiplies. There's a real value. And the best compliment I get from one of my writings is, "you change the way I think". |
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