Through The Firewall by Boyd Clewis

Author:Boyd Clewis [Clewis, Boyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Forbes Books

I branched out and started building an international brand as a speaker and consultant. That first time I attended the PCI Community Meeting, I had also noticed right away that some of the speakers were not polished. At the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, I can do better. When I had left American and increasingly started flying around the world, consulting, and making contacts, more and more people liked the way I conducted business. That ultimately got me an invite to speak for the PCI Standards Council.

Having to come up with an idea for a presentation made me realize how much my experience as a system administrator and IT support guy helped me as a security consultant. Some of the lazy practices that I picked up as an admin are a security person’s nightmares: sharing passwords, using one password for an entire team, not installing system updates, etcetera. I knew where to check myself because I had been that guy.

I had to get creative when brainstorming what to do for the presentation. The idea was to do a live demo of someone stealing credit card data from a system in a way that mirrored real life. It happens all the time: an administrator shares account info insecurely, it falls into the wrong hands, data gets stolen, and we can’t determine the guilty party—the administrators don’t want to be held responsible, so they’re never honest, and then everyone’s pointing the finger at everyone else. It’s just like siblings when something gets broken in the house and the parents get mad—nobody’s guilty.

I turned that whole situation into a mystery and wanted to engage the audience by having them solve it. Instead of a whodunit, I called it a “Su-Dunnit.” It’s a geeky in-joke: on Linux systems, whenever you’re operating at the highest access level, that level is called sudo. I went and bought a Sherlock Holmes hat and a pipe at Party City, and eventually introduced myself as Sherlock Homey. That made me so much money, because it made me recognizable. One of my current employees calls me Sherlock to this day.

I flew out to Vancouver for the week and walked into the auditorium before presenting. The whole setup was breathtaking. Thousands of people were going to be in attendance. Even before I spoke, I realized, This is it. This is really happening. They gave me a speaker badge, and I then had to get makeup done for the first time.

I still remember telling this lady backstage, “You are not about to put makeup on me.”

She showed me a horrible picture of someone without stage makeup and said, “Well, this is how you’ll look on stage if you go without it.”

That changed my mind immediately. “Okay. Fine. Shine me up.”

There were three thousand people inside of the arena, and thousands more streaming, but I felt comfortable from all the presentations I’d done at American. I’d sat in boardrooms with leadership and multimillionaire-CEO-type people. I wasn’t nervous at all. I felt like I belonged because I had put in the work.

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