* (Sans means ‘without’ in French)
“Nice is dead. Good has a future. Nice doesn’t have a future, because nice ends up with gulags.“
(Eric Weinstein in a recent interview to Lex Fridman from the Articifical Intelligence Podcast)
(Jamiroquai, “Virtual Insanity”, from the album “Travelling Without Moving”)
There is a reason why people in the west can’t grasp how the disappearance of privacy and the total exposure of our most intimate states is a part of a dystopian nightmare, and it has to do with who we are.
Why autism education and Cybersecurity awareness training fails and how to solve it.
By Eh’den Biber
“If you think you’re going to solve your cybersecurity awareness problem by technology, you don’t understand your problem, and you don’t understand technology” (paraphrasing Bruce Schneier)
Everyone tries to solve the lack of cybersecurity awareness, and everyone fails. They fail because they don’t understand how our we integrate “information” into what we perceive as an expansion of our perception.
The current approach tries to address the problem via focusing on the #conscious, while the truth of the matter is that we interact with the real world via the #subconscious. As if we are not living in an age of a constant and increasingly intrusive digital distortion of our perception of reality, that is attacking our subconscious and manipulating us by knowing our biases (example: fake news). As if expansion of knowledge changes our core drivers. If knowledge was able to change people perception, people wouldn’t be smoking after they see all the horrific photos on the cover of all tobacco products. We live in a digitized era. The digital world is everywhere, it is part of who “we are”. Your dopamine reward system are being hacked constantly by your mobile phone apps, it is integrated into “your” physical experience. A growth of knowledge on the conscious level does not give you any measurable impact on the subconscious, because… that’s why we call it “subconscious” – we can’t measure it. Knowledge doesn’t change perception, direct experience does. After been given the diagnose of my youngest son extreme autism I was reading and learning everything I could about it, and the impact it might have, but it didn’t allowed me to understand him, nor to influence him. I didn’t feel like he did, so I couldn’t grasp that it means to be autistic.
In the past years a new malware has been slowly yet steadily taking over our world. It spreads like wildfire throughout our society, corporate and governmental world, and by doing so it increases the probability of our annihilation. It morphed and evolved, most of our infrastructure is now compromised, and yet most people don’t even recognise their infrastructure is as well.
This is the story of the malware, which started in 1837…
(see the end of the post with the update…)
During the SANS European awareness summit, I’ve ended up in an interesting debate on twitter with one of the attendees (John Scott). The debate was on the observation I made that science was not part of the agenda in this major awareness summit. There was not a single scientist on stage to talk about their breakthrough research, and none of the tweets about the event (#SecAwareSummit) included any science in them.
My observations didn’t go that well with John, who seems to have taken it a bit personal. To show me I was wrong he mentioned that Jessica Barker gave a talk. Yes, she did, and yes: she’s a (civil design) doctor, and I barely finished Kindergarten.
When SANS finally posted the slides from the event (including the workshops that occurred before), it seems that the only one who provided external references in their slides was Jess (well done). She mentioned 5 academic papers (from 1996, 1999, 2008, 2008, 2009), one reference to TED talk (2012) and one book (2017). Only one of the research mentioned was focused on information security (2009, Self-efficacy in information security: Its influence on end users’ information security practice behaviour), it used social cognitive theory, and the results suggested that simply listing what not to do and penalties associated with a wrong doing in the users’ information security policy alone will have a limited impact on effective implementation of security measures.
I’ll let Iago express my feelings about that one:
