I’m so excited, I can do my whitty titles again!

Lots of thinking lately…

Question: Am I doing what I love to do? Answer: No, but then again, this CO-OP isn’t even in the department I want to work in.
Question: Am I studying what I love to do? Answer: No, but in my defense Ohio State doesn’t have an information security major nor any program that would lead me to such a place and my Mom would never have allowed me to get an associates degree (and frankly neither would I).
Question: Am I sacrificing too much to get where I want to go? Answer: Not yet…
Question: Am I capable of getting where I want to go? “Aye, there’s the rub.”

I’m not changing majors. Frankly, there is no major at an non-military school that would let me do what I really wanted to do in life so I’m already settling for something else. I don’t want to call the “the next best thing” but CSE/IS really is for me. Sadly… the network security officers are already a dieing breed even before their importance was ever recognized. I’ve read article after article about the awesomeness and creativity that information security people have and work with. But the reality is that these people are disappearing. The need for an expert has seemed to vanish in the wake of corporate America’s juggernaut. Everything is becoming to easy… security managers all have nice consoles now that they can do deep level packet analysis without even know what a freaking packet is, much less the topologies that carry the around the frikin world. With the touch of a button, a clerk who knows nothing more than how to type in word can now reverse authenticate all incoming traffic tracing back through proxy servers and in some cases even able to piggy back encrypted transmissions so they don’t have to decipher anything and get a full report of who is trying to hack you at any given moment. Information security in almost a total joke anymore to the corporate world. SOX did nothing but create a new reason to generate cost benefits reports… and here’s a surprise the cost of the possibility of being sued is actually less than the cost of securing your systems to you don’t expose information!!!! I’m a pragmatist and know that for corporations is ridiculous to think that building a new Fort Knox around your servers is a bit of overkill in the end, but (insert expletives at leisure) this information is peoples lives your are playing with. I’m half tempted to create a coalition of IS/IT managers, team them up with hackers and steal all of corporate America’s executive’s personal information and every time a company needlessly exposes a clients personal information we expose their Presidents, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CISOs, etc etc to the point that their identities are stolen and then they know why its important to secure their information!

I think my soap box is getting slippery…