IT Insights Blog — cybersecurity

There are lots of different things in life that we periodically replace or renew. Underwear, for example. There's probably no need to explain the rationale behind this practice. Just know that, if you haven't been changing your underwear often, well, you should probably make a different choice. Doing it every day would be ideal, but you ought to at least consider attending to this rather routine item of personal hygiene management a couple of times per week.

The discovery of the long-lost but never-forgotten city of Troy in present-day Turkey was one of the landmark archaeological finds of the 19th century, and, indeed, in the history of archaeology. Heinrich Schliemann unearthed Troy while excavating a 100-foot-high mound on the Aegean coast of Turkey, though the adventurous German was more of a colorful character and archaeological hobbyist than a researcher or scientist. Think Indiana Jones without a professorship or a teaching position.

Welcome to October! We can probably all agree that the most exciting thing about October is the prospect of eating a lot of cheap candy and staying up late to watch scary movies. There will be office Halloween parties, costumes for revelers both young and old, and pumpkins with crooked grins and glowing eyes as far as the eye can see. If Netflix were really on the ball there'd be an all new Stranger Things, like, now, instead of probably sometime in March or April.

When discussing the overall state of information security, it's commonplace to suggest that everyone is at risk, and that hackers will eventually manage to get past anything put in place to stop them. Commentators frequently assert that the question is not whether this or that business or organization will be hacked, but when the hack will occur. It's a gloomy worldview that sometimes feels not just pessimistic, but wholly defeatist, in a "What's the use in even trying" sort of way.

It's funny how we attach romantic allure to things that aren't really all that appealing. Take pirates, for example. Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, because sometimes people are silly like that. And, yes, pirates as they exist in pop culture, as well as in the popular imagination, have a distinctive and amusing way of talking. And sometimes we probably all want to say more things using fun S-words like "scurvy," and "scalawag," and "scurrilous."