Extreme Tech Analysis by Wolf

My bags are packed, and I am going to Seattle WA in about an hours It is 6:00 am, and I have managed to sleep for about 2 hours. There are so many things to do.

In 2005, I was siting in the faculty office at a local college, where I teach a couple of classes on computer security. The faculty office at that time was a large room with one whole wall of windows that faced (mostly) West. Dr Alfred Basta came in and sat down beside me. He asked, “You are a hacker?”

We started planning a book on the details of hacking on that day. There was nothing available that showed what we believed needed to be shown. The books available were either far too technical for the average educated person (or even for the average 3rd-year college student majoring in IT Security) or far more common, they were far to general and unspecific. I call it “a 2000-yard view” like the understanding you would get about a culture by floating above it in a hot-air balloon. One of the problems is the tendency to objectify a group. This is what happens when one takes a perceived trait tacked on to the group, like “Hackers are all young geeks wanting attention,” and using that as if it is the truth about all hackers. Sure, some hackers are young geeks, or proto-geeks looking for attention from their peers, but certainly not all hackers fit this very weak profile. We go deep into the motivations and methods of illegal hacking. You will not find a fearful attitude in the writing as you often find in writing about “bad guys” in the media.

We know that it is impossible to win against an enemy you cannot see, and stereotyping tends to obscure reality. You need to read this book if you are at all interested in what is really happening on this threat horizon.

So back to today… I turned in the manuscript for peer review and the “editorial process” in August of 2006. and then proceeded to tighten and update all of the text for the next year. In August of this year, the book appeared on the market, timed to meet the September adoption cycle for textbooks. In March of 2007 I started a correspondence with the people who put on the SecureWorldExpo events all over the country. I wanted to do talks on security and let the business world know this book was available. Why would businesspeople care? The same reason you would care, that they cannot protect themselves from what they don’t know about, but also they are marketed heavily by all sorts of security vendors who use fear as their tactic to develop sales. Sorry guys, you know that fear is a huge motivator. Businesses that spend money get it from their customers. You are their customers, so you benefit when I can help somebody see where security spending makes sense. In a convoluted way, Alfred and I are doing all this for you.

So I am going to Seattle on Saturday and speaking at the SecureWorldExpo.com event on Tuesday. The book is available at http://networkdefense.biz. Wish me luck. I will tell you all about the event when I get back.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 5:53 am and is filed under Tech Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.