I gave a talk at William Woods University on Friday about protecting yourself on social media sites and after I got done with my talk and was chatting with a group of students who came up to ask some follow up questions they didn’t want to ask in front of the group when one of the kids (I am getting old if I can call a college aged man a kid) came up said:
Great talk but isn’t this mostly common sense stuff? Do people really not know this?
OUCH.
I am pretty sure he just asked me why he wasted an hour listening to me tell people to not post images of their junk on twitter when he could have been out playing Frisbee on the quad.
I told him most people should but a lot of smart people don’t so a refresher isn’t always a bad idea and I then wanted to yell something about staying off my lawn at him.
Then tonight my buddy @jack_daniel goes on a twitter rampage about how security people can barely hide their contempt for the “stupid people” they work with.
It got me thinking about the self-image that I and many security people have.
We want to see ourselves as the Navy Seals of our IT Shop. We do what no one else can do! We do it better, faster and sexier.
When in reality we are Paul Blart trying to tell our users nicely to not click links, have good passwords and not give the companies bank account information to a Nigerian Prince. Often with little real recourse we can take ourselves without calling someone else.
So maybe if we actually started acting like Paul Blart and not the Navy Seals our end users would respect us and we could do what we are actually paid to do, Keep things in order and when something bad goes down call in the people with the real power.
