SOP-4 CYBERSECURITY PH.D. TRACK
RISKS DO EXIST – CYBERSECURITY IT’S NOT JUST ONLINE – IT’S ONLINE/OFFLINE AND EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING IN BETWEEN
Having been manager for a small, family owned, industrial cooling manufacturer for many years, I was forced to be strongly aware of/recognize risk as an undesired player and take extreme measures to anticipate and quickly resolve even sudden, unexpected outcomes from all corners: solvents, electricity, chemicals (cobalt octoate & MEK peroxide), rotating machines/5' dia fan aluminum blades, ladders, fumes and vapors (styrene, PVC off-gas from vacuum forming), hammers, “legacy” workshop roofs, hand-held tools that could suddenly flash and could do damage big time if unprotected…
When doing field work I saw quite a few people simply being unaware of numerous things that could "go wrong" at any time, e.g. ladders, interim fixes or patches. I was glad I had worked in an APO school and was formally introduced to risks, even performed scheduled/unscheduled evacuation drills.
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Almost every time I went to industries I would see "NNN days without accidents" and so on. Say for instance some guy was working with a rotating drilling machine, suddenly the bit went loose and shot like a bullet. But asides from say freak accidents, we all people can do dumb things, e.g. run in the wrong direction or rest our back on something we shouldn't.
Now to cyber …
There's nothing celestial in cloud computing. As in the “real world,” tons of things can go wrong and that doesn't necessarily mean foul play, it just indicates “unpreparedness” something I almost always exercise against. I especially like Abe Lincoln’s anecdote as regards when he was given 8 hours to fell a tree. He spent about 7 hours sharpening the axe. Same with what I have seen succeed in almost any domain. A stitch in time … an ounce of prevention …. endless quotes.
EVIL DOES EXIST – THERE’S GOOD CYBERSEC BUT THERE’S ALSO BAD CYBERSEC
I "hate" this part but must acknowledge Dr. M. Scott Speck, MD. is right. Evil does exist. The problem was that this fact went into hiding when which was once a single discipline, psychology ("it's not my problem and I don't want to deal with it") and philosophy ("remedy for the soul") were chopped as partitions; things never crossed the artificially separating membrane.
Because of this many people are blind to evil. I can attest to that myself!
For many decades I never thought evil existed. Innocence is the most powerful thing on earth!
The moment I read Dr. Peck statements I realize it was true, and sad to acknowledge the fact, I now see it almost everywhere! Being now a sort of curated resin or hardened skin not much of a problem.
I got lucky in life and able to meet tons of people and have a hand in numerous critical infrastructure contexts: power generation, water supply, wastewater treatment, hazardous or gas phase pollution handling (ammonia refrigeration, my eyes were crying even being outdoor!), HCl recovery, aluminum fumes. OK not much transportation. Data center HVAC/cooling so open to mischief of all sorts. Unfortunately have seen the highest corruption/collusion schemes in HVAC, at least shopping malls and gov’t. Will they spare data centers?
Real or virtual, just one little thing wrong, and if unprepared, the whole thing can go horribly wrong (recall some oil refinery accidents). The devil is in the details ..
Most people would say "Nothing is going to happen" while in my mind I was processing otherwise "Everything is going to happen!" in mental, safety routines/environment scanning.
When it comes to cyber attacks those guys are not playing.
Those guys will lie like crazy like some big industries do.
Those guys can be insane - just remember 9/11, almost every day there's some big ticket incident, in particular cyber warfare.
Too avoid “emotions” I would probably use a "sanitized" term regardless of the intent: danger!
Aside from cyber wars, there’s economic wars and that’s why I’m eating sweet corn and green beans from China (and it’s tastier than most locals).
I once tried to convince Martha Laughman to upsize from her Gold Star families, mutual supportive activities to heads on start up a Gold Patrol cybersecurity "turn the tables." Best way to remember and honor them is to up the ante and man the cyberships big time.
I completed the two cybersec series by Google and Microsoft to essentially pick up glossary/concepts. Microsoft’s series was full of holes; Google version was very well planned and executed.
But now the increase in attack surface and liabilities HUGE and the need to be familiar with many fields AND languages is crucial. The earlier the cyber literacy the better!
A GOOD BLEND
What I realized is that because blessed such a diverse background, I can quickly shunt from one interdisciplinary area (e.g. power/cybersec/precision HVAC) to another (obviously in a team of specialist) and ask questions (the analytical machine!). Have you considered this or that? Where did you get that? Show me.
I saw that computing/IT/CS people in general are off hands and that doesn't work well, even if it's just a visit to manufacturing or processing floor.
Unfortunately existing computer community has not good manners to my taste: broken code every three years, wrongly classified emails, unresponsive browsers, out of memory crashes, worse and worse local machine performance, intentional to my belief.
So even with benign applications CS is not delivering/performing to grade.
Too much hype, hundreds of empty suits, commercial interests compound things to the uninitiated. And then, wait till you get AI tricksters in full swing …
Thus I think I can be a reasonably accelerator for peers and other folks as "how things work" and quickly point to what could be most likely Achilles heels.
I tried, in vain, to persuade both my former APO schools to introduce cyberscurity in their curricula, say 2 semester elective. Part of the half-baked but well supported rationale draft (every day I get updates from agencies and cyber folks). Disregard the other site pages, just these foundational notes:
https://engineeringfundamentals.com/high-school-cybersecurity/why.html
Cybersecurity is not only online ... it's online/offline/ and everywhere and anywhere in between.
And still one can have a terrific time all the while!!! Innocence is the most powerful force in the world.