Describing cybersecurity can look a lot like the story of the blind men and the elephant. One grabs the trunk and says “This is a snake." Another reaches to the elephant’s ear and says it’s a fan. One feels the tusk and says it’s a spear. And so on, each believing that they - and only they - know the elephant..

To many, cybersecurity is IT managing the network. To others, it’s complying with laws and legal obligations. Others see it as a risk management matter to be managed with insurance. Others see it as an operational risk-reduction challenge. Yet to others, cybersecurity is a workforce challenge or the challenge of protecting seniors from romance and other scams. Truth be told, cybersecurity is all of these things along with matters of war and peace … as the cyberwar playing out in Ukraine demonstrates.

Join Stan and Julie as they riff on the opportunities to improve our collective cybersecurity - get our arms around the whole cyber-elephant so to speak - by breaking down the silos, listening to each other, and co-creating opportunities to collaborate … to make 1 + 1 = 1,000 as we say at SecureTheVillage..

As always, Stan and Julie provide actionable tips and thoughtful wisdom in a fun conversation on the complexities of cybersecurity and privacy.

For a 90-second introduction to the Cyber-Elephant please watch our SecureTheVillage video.

Albert Einstein famously said: “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”

Bill Gates clearly articulated the thinking that got us into our cybersecurity mess when he wrote in his 1999 book Business@The Speed of Thought: “How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”

Where are cybersecurity and privacy in Bill’s prediction, you ask? Exactly!! They’re not. They’re missing. Cybersecurity and privacy did not make it into Bill’s level of thinking until 2002.

Join Stan and Julie as they riff on the level of thinking required for cybersecurity and privacy.

We like to drive our cars fast. So we ensure they have good brakes, safety and crash systems, and drivers. And we need our vehicles to provide safety and performance feedback to the driver. A high-performance car without these is a danger. So we require car manufacturers to build safety and crash systems.

Central to this new level of cybersecurity and privacy thinking is the “driver’s” need for transparency in what applications are doing with the information we entrust to them … and the pitfalls waiting for companies failing to include security and customer privacy in their level of thinking. (We’re talking about you, GoodRX!!)

As always, Stan and Julie provide actionable tips and thoughtful wisdom in a fun conversation on the complexities of cybersecurity and privacy.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”   Strother Martin to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.

A related quote often attributed to George Bernard Shaw “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Join Stan and Julie as they riff on this all-too common challenge that what we say doesn’t always convey what we mean.

In cybersecurity the failure to communicate finds a home in leadership failures and technology mishaps. The leader who sends mixed messages, telling staff to take security seriously while starving the security team of needed budget. The technology manager whose failure to be specific about required security controls results in an application with dangerous vulnerabilities. Ambiguity is built into language, as Stan and Julie demonstrate in their analysis of “This sentence is false.” Is it true” Is it false?

As always, Stan and Julie provide actionable tips and thoughtful wisdom in a fun conversation on the complexities of cybersecurity and privacy. For an excellent read on avoiding ambiguity see Alan Alda’s witty book ”If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating.”

For more information, please visit https://securethevillage.org/

Noted author and satirist H.L. Mencken is famous for pointing out that  “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Tom Stoppard, in his play "Arcadia" describes the scientific ferment of the 1820s as follows: "A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."
 
This is part of the way I feel about where we are today.…

Everything we thought we knew is wrong.
 
• What are facts? What is true?
 • The implications of climate change
 • The permanence of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
 • The belief that we were secure in our information and our privacy
 
Yes; it's scary. Yes; It's sad. Yes; It's dangerous.
 
But it's also exhilarating.

It's Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill.

It's us discovering/creating new forms to secure the village.

No one's done this before. No one's had to do this before.

And now we're part of a community of interested people and organizations working together to create a secure private world.

How cool.

This is the long-term view.

In cybersecurity, We're being told "Don't trust. Verify." 

This makes the cybersecurity industry an unwilling active participant in the breakdown of trust in society.

And yet, Francis Fukuyama, award-winning Stanford Professor, contends in his book “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity” that “in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.”

Simply put, we need to rebuild the bonds of trust if our economy is to remain competitive. 

Julie and Stan discuss this challenge in the context of America’s clearly inadequate cybersecurity where China, Russia, and others are stealing our intellectual property while costing our economy more than $1,250,000, 000,000 per year, more than 6% of GDP. 

Central to the discussion is an observation CISA Chief of Staff Kiersten Todt made: “People don’t trust institutions. People trust people.” 

We explore how this idea leads to community and how it maps to what others are doing to heal America, like the Aspen Institute’s Weave Project.