Changes

I really should be more faithful to this blog, instead I seem to be sporadic at best. No excuses, I will commit to be more regular in the future. The motivation for this blog are changes, a new job and a new academic beginning. On Monday I will start my new job as Senior Systems Specialist with ENGlobal tasked with programming and commissioning pump station controls for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium project in Russia and Kazakhstan. The assignment should prove both challenging and interesting requiring trips to that part of the world, I will keep you posted.

The other change is my acceptance into the Sam Houston State University Graduate School. I will be pursuing a master degree in Information Assurance and Security.

From the University website the description for the degree is:
"The Master of Science in Information Assurance and Security degree prepares students for professional careers in commercial, industrial and governmental information assurance. Graduates of the program will utilize knowledge and methods to insure the protection of corporate information resources. Graduates will be able to effectively harden and secure network systems, prevent network damage, perform risk assessment and plan for disaster recovery. This degree is accessible to students who have completed undergraduate Computer Science or Management Information Systems majors or minors and to those with baccalaureate degrees in related technical fields and appropriate professional experience. "

Thirty years ago computer networking was still in its infancy, the internet was a dark and wild place where only the bravest men of science dared to tread. There was no America Online or Google, only Internet Relay Chats and a funny little program called "mosaic" that could unravel the cryptic addresses of the maze of computers if you were smart enough to understand the numerology of what would one day become the world wide web. It wasn't until the 1990's when Al Gore invented the information super highway that things really took off and millions of computers came online. It wasn't until after the government built the superhighway through the wilderness that the AOL's and the Ebay's became possible, and with the flow of cash came the fraudsters and the black hat hackers seeking to steal whatever wasn't tied down. Today the World Wide Web is a very sophisticated place where the zombie bot nets will rob you blind and decimate your systems if you do not protect yourself. Mere firewalls alone will not do it, security must be a full court press of a myriad of techniques and strategies, our applications must have security built in not bolted on if we are going to be protected from the cyber war that rages on the other side of our keyboard.

The future is now, everything is streaming into the cloud, that nebulous ether world where bits and bytes combine and entwine, where the stealthy and the dark seek to plunder by stealing our most sensitive information. The predators of this age are armed with encrypted malware designed to inject itself into our systems infecting and duplicating its vile intentions into the most vulnerable parts of the user application converting our systems into  mindless armies obeying the will of an evil and faceless task master.

In order to survive businesses must have a full suite of security oriented strategies in place to detect and thwart attacks before they occur.