Category: Uncategorized
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From Stage Fright to Sage Light: A Taoist Journey in Public Speaking and Business Continuity
Last month, I received an unexpected email: an invitation to guest-lecture on disaster recovery and business continuity planning at a local university. The audience? Nearly one hundred students, bright-eyed and notebook-ready. My first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was anxiety. I’ve faced ransomware, nation-state intrusions, and zero-days that kept me up for nights. But public speaking?…
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Who Learns More: The Student or the Teacher?
In the dance of knowledge, who truly gains more—the one who receives or the one who gives? From a Taoist lens, this question dissolves into the flow of the Tao itself, where teaching and learning are not separate but intertwined, like the yin and yang. Drawing from the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and modern…
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The Taoist Concept of Te and Red Team Activities
In the realm of cybersecurity, where proactive defense is key, the Taoist concept of Te—often translated as virtue, integrity, or power—offers a profound lens for understanding Red Team and penetration testing (pentest) activities. Rooted in the Tao Te Ching, Te represents the natural expression of the Tao, the underlying principle of the universe, manifesting as…
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The Pyramid of Pain Meets the Tao: A Cybersecurity Journey Through Ancient Wisdom
In the high-stakes world of cybersecurity, where threats lurk like shadows in a digital forest, defenders often arm themselves with a simple yet profound tool: the Pyramid of Pain. Introduced by David J. Bianco in 2013, this framework ranks indicators of compromise (IOCs) from the trivial to the transformative, urging us to climb toward defenses…
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Reflecting on my previous post, I see the extremes in life growing ever wider. This week’s shooting—a catalyst—will send shock-waves that neither the left nor the right can fully grasp. Commentary suggests this is a crystallizing event, shattering the extremes we once knew and pushing them further apart. The left calls for punching more “Nazis”;…
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A few days late and a fist full of dollars short…
I failed. Two weeks without a post. I could cite writers block but that’s not the case. Nor did 75 Hard get in the way really. I simply did not make the time to write. In the past weeks it has been a bit interesting. I signed up for the IC again, I have a…
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Mentally I’m here
I write today from Estes Park, at the Stanley Hotel, currently enjoying a drink while I wait for the girlfriend to finish her massage. It is beautiful up here this time of year and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate a milestone anniversary than being here. The day of course has me…
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The Holidays
It is that time of year again and I am reminded of not only the good but also the bad in my past. A lingering ghost if you will that is refusing to leave though it’s getting easier to ignore. The tree is up for the first time in over a decade and presents litter…
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On Giving Thanks
For those in the US it is Thanksgiving, or how I used to refer to it Turkey Day. For a long time, I didn’t really understand the nature of the holiday or what it would become for me only a few years ago. When I was younger, I would visit various families homes for sometimes…
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Post Maine Reflection
It has been about a month since the Maine Event and I thought I would take a moment and reflect. The month afterwards was a bit crazy, with Cyber Security Awareness Month being in full effect at work and my recovering from a nasty cold turned sinus infection I didn’t really get to sit down…
The Half-assed Taoist 