Can My Evangelist Keynote Your Summit?

John McCumber

John McCumber is a cybersecurity executive, retired US Air Force officer, and former Cryptologic Fellow of the National Security Agency. In addition to his professional activities, John is a former Professorial Lecturer in Information Security at The George Washington University in Washington, DC and is currently a technical editor and columnist for Security Technology Executive magazine. John is the author of the textbook Assessing and Managing Security Risk in IT Systems: a Structured Methodology

Related Post Roulette

4 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    Why do people pay extra to hear Congressmen speak on a topic outside their field of expertise?

    Edit: Never mind. I was reading quickly and missed the part about how they wanted to get a chance to talk to the Congressman, which is obviously much more valuable than a chance to listen to a Congressman.Report

    • John McCumber in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Sir,

      No one paid extra for this keynote. The Congressperson at the time was the caucus chair of a committee drafting national legislation that would affect every attendee at the conference.

      McReport

  2. Jaybird says:

    My dealings with Cybersecurity is 50% “it’s a racket” and 50% “if we just get these guys to change their router login from admin/admin, we’ll have done something”.

    I’ve worked with security people who insist that it’s not enough to merely mitigate risk, we have to prevent it! (These are usually the ones who don’t have a whole lot of technical knowledge.) “How can we prevent our sysadmins from harming the system?”

    And I’ve worked with security folks who explain to me that we are just picking between which threat we want to worry about. Are you more afraid of foreign hackers? Require 16 character passwords that either have to be written down or involve keyboard patterns that are easily shoulder-surfed! Are you more afraid of shoulder surfing? Well, you probably don’t want passwords that need to be written down or keyboard patterns in order to be remembered.

    I kinda prefer the latter.

    I can’t help but notice that it’s the former who come in like a whirlwind after some big conference and explain to me that we have to change everything.Report