An Information Security Place

My sales guy and I have a small little office in one of those business suite companies (actually, the company is called Businessuites) where there are several small companies on a single floor that has a single receptionist, etc.  Anyway, we have a firewall / VPN device, a switch, a WAP, and a little NAS in our office, and they had all been on the floor near a corner with cables hanging everywhere.  So I finally broke down and went to Target (pronounced Tar – jay, of course) to find a little table or something to put all the equipment on.  Well, I found a nice little entertainment center thingie that has two glass doors that open outward.  So I put all the stuff in there, got it all cleaned up, took a moment to be a little proud of my work, and then sat back at my desk.

Then, as I was working, I looked over at the little piece of furniture, and I noticed the blinking lights of the firewall and the switch, and it hit me that blinking lights behind glass are just plain cool, even on this small of a scale.  Now I know most of you have been awed by a cool datacenter with wiring racks and switches and routers and whatever else sitting behind a big pane of glass.  I know I have seen some really spectacular ones in my time.  But it still struck me that a pane of glass is really what it takes.  And for the life of me, I don’t know why…

Vet

LoverVamp has taken issue with Andy’s post about user education being the key to security.  LV says:

I’m not sure I would say that user education is key and that without it we may as well put up open wifi. I think user education is very important, but it won’t solve IT security any more than education has solved drug use, teen pregnancy, or STDs.

While LV is going after Andy for a comment that was really tongue-in-cheek, I thought his analogy about drug use and sex education was appropriate.  So as some are doing is sex education, I propose that we move towards abstinence in IT security education.  If we just take everyone’s computer away, we have no more IT security problems!  Instead of wearing the digital condoms created by firewalls, IDS /IPS, NAC, etc., we just rip the friggin’ plugs out of the wall and be done with it!  That would really reduce everyone’s stress factor.

Vet