Holistic IT education / learning: secure all the things

In July, I witnessed a very interesting PoC in a talk, sketched out against a particular vendor's routers based on the "best practice" router hardening firewall configuration example given in a well recognised, highly thought of book. 

This lead me to thinking about the need for more thorough consideration of IT security throughout careers, and in particular, the danger of blindly relying on other people's information. 

I've embargoed this post until now, because it contains a low-content description of a potential vulnerability, and I can see that steps that should address it have been taken - hence the publication date; this was written shortly after that talk spurred some thoughts...

Interview / job application preparation

I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table several times. I certainly don’t think I’ve mastered either end of that game, but certainly, there are some common key things you need to think about before you submit a CV and again before you hopefully head into a job interview...

Read it, note it, (re)do it, teach IT: How to learn effectively

It's no secret that IT is a career in which you need to keep learning. 

It's also a given that many IT professionals are not given the time, space or resources they need to do this at work, so they end up doing it in their "spare time", to the detriment of other things they might otherwise like to be doing. Others are given this at work, but at a low priority, or in a half-hearted way where you have 8 hours of work a day you're expected to get done every day - sure you can spend some time learning, but you still need to deliver that 8 hours of what the business considers "work"! 

So it makes sense that no matter what we do, we ought to maximise the ROI on our "learning time"!

Dunning-Kruger and Learning

I can't imagine you've never heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect - it is a popular and well known model of actual expertise vs. perceived expertise, and your confidence in them. I think, as IT professionals, it is useful that we know it exists, particularly as we embrace new technology or extend our learning. 

So why is this a big deal...? 

Tune your home network for Work-from-Home / Quarantine / Isolation - "Un-Suck your Wi-Fi"!

I can't authoritatively comment on COVID-19, despite a lot of years in the biological sciences, even some microbiology and a long term, vague (perhaps somewhat morbid) interest in emerging pathogens.

I certainly CAN suggest how you can tune up your home network to ensure it's going to be the best it can be to cope with you, your partner, flatmates, relatives and children (or whatever your domestic arrangement might be!) stuck at home and depending on the Internet as a life-line.

More and more countries seem to be enacting (entirely justifiable) stringent isolation measures for many weeks at a time, so I trust this information will be of some small help during this difficult time.

Funemployment

My wife and I recently moved continents, and I have now joined the ranks of the funemployed, because (for our family) moving was more important that moving to a job. I'm certainly going to miss my old job (because, aside from being given billions of dollars and told to go explore the oceans, "Network Architect" is exactly where I want to be, and I worked with great people and did fun things!).

Read on for some thoughts on how to make the most of this process, and perhaps some ideas of what to do when you move vast distances...

Trust Boundaries and Reliable Backups: Ransomware Edition

A network whose administrators I know quite well has been thoroughly compromised and critical files encrypted, and much configuration destroyed. Even their backups (such as they were) are no more.

This is, to put it mildly, a fairly catastrophic incident for any organisation.

We turned our minds to the issue and thought about how we can prevent similar things happening to us...