An Information Security Place

I am going to make another parallel of security to the real world (not that security isn’t the real world, but I couldn’t think of a better term to use).  Of course, this parallel might make some of the guys out there question my manhood, but oh well.

So my wife is a sugar artist.  Basically, this means that she uses sugar as a medium for her art (not too hard so far).  She bakes cakes, she makes flowers from something called gumpaste, makes other creations with royal icing, etc. (she enters these pieces of art in competitions and has won some awards as well – she’s very good).  Anyway, she went to a show this last weekend, and she showed me some pictures of the cakes there.  Now I have become quite a good judge of cakes and sugar art in the last few years, simply because my wife has pointed out things while she made cakes or we looked at other cakes. 

She pointed out one cake in particular to ask me what I thought.  Confident in my abilities, I boldly stated that I thought it was fairly good.  But April quickly pointed out that almost all of the decoration on the cake was made with molds.  The person who made the cake did not do much more than poor some type of sugar medium into a mold, let it dry, then put it on the cake.  Basically that means that the technique in making the cake was not very complicated. So essentially, the advent of molds in the sugar world has made it possible for almost anyone to make a cake that looks really good.  A judge will notice it in competition and take off points since the technique was not complicated, but the cake still looks good. 

So I drew a parallel for April to the security world (and I don’t even think she rolled her eyes when I did it).  I said this was very reminiscent of the script kiddies in the security world.  A long time ago a hacker had to know what they were doing to break into a system (I don’t like using “hacker” to mean a bad guy, but again, lack of a better term).  But some of those same hackers that knew what they were doing started writing tools to automate the work.  Well, these tools got, and people who really didn’t know all the ins and outs of hacking suddenly found themselves having the ability to hack systems.  And these tools have steadily gotten easier to use and more powerful.

So there you have it.  The world of security and the world of cakes coming together in my jacked-up mind.  By the way, the picture is my wife’s cake, and there is no molding going on there.  And she won first place with this beauty.

Vet