Information Safety

Improving technology through lessons from safety.

Minnebar 19

· @jabenninghoff

Last Saturday I spoke for the first time at Minnebar! It was my second time attending, and I’ve found it to be both informative and entertaining! Where else can you attend talks on selling as a founder, moving past the metaphor of technical debt, the development of the Atari 2600 (by an engineer who worked on it!), and using open source in government?

I presented both on my own and was a contributor to Dan Lew’s excellent talk on How to (privately!) surf the internet, which was popular enough to draw the largest room (the theater)! My own talk, You already know (most) of what you need to know about cybersecurity! was also well attended, I got great questions and some nice feedback from the attendees!

The talk consolidates ideas from my past work in a presentation geared towards a broad but still tech-savvy audience. The core ideas are simple: first, security isn’t about avoiding negative outcomes (breaches), it’s about improving security performance, and second, that most of the activities that improve security performance don’t require security expertise.

While my solo talk wasn’t recorded, the slides are available here.

Abstract

You don’t have to be Mr. Robot to be secure! While cybersecurity may seem mysterious and difficult, the most effective things you can do are like eating well and exercising: easy to understand, but sometimes hard to do. In the past 5 years, we’ve learned that much of the work needed to secure software-based systems are activities we already do, like regularly updating software and turning off services you don’t need.

I’ll review what data-driven research says about what matters most in cybersecurity, bust myths about what doesn’t matter, and when you really do need to call in the experts. Whether you write code, build infrastructure, run a startup, or just manage your home network, I’ll share practical advice on what you can do to be secure and what you should leave to others.

Slides

My slides with notes, including references, are here.

Here is the link from the QR code at the end of my talk: https://bento.me/jbenninghoff.