Entries by RedSeal

Mapping Policy to Your Network

A few years ago, I sat in an otherwise empty classroom inside the administration building of a children’s hospital with two members of their security team. We stared at a spreadsheet and a document that described the server and client zones of their network, displayed from a projector like a classroom project. For each zone, […]

Was It Something I Said?

I was in one of those small, interior conference rooms when it first happened. It was very hot outside, with an obvious threat of another day over 100°F and extreme humidity, as well. But, it felt even hotter in the room. I was there to provide insights to members of the network and security teams […]

Identify and Close Before the Bad Actor Exploits

It happened again yesterday. I was taking a break on my back porch and listening to the Colorado summer rain when an alert hit my phone: news of another breach. They seem to be coming with a disturbingly increasing regularity and with ever more serious consequences. For example, one company, Code Spaces, was completely destroyed […]

The Reality Gap

A couple years ago in a conference room with a window looking out on the Arizona desert, two of us sat down with a customer to talk about their network. I asked to see their best network diagram, which he left to retrieve. When he returned, he rolled it out to its full length on […]

Somewhere Over the Spreadsheet

Two years ago I was standing in front of a group of security geeks in Santa Barbara for BSides LA talking about the sophisticated tools that most network engineers use — like “ping” and “traceroute” and even Excel — and about how the broad range of tools available typically didn’t get used in a primordial […]