February 2017 Archives

Alrighty... now that my RSA summary post is out of the way, let's get into a deeply personal post about how absolutely horrible of a week I had at RSA. Actually, that's not fair. The first half of the week was ok, but some truly horrible human beings targeted me (on social media) on Wednesday of that week, and it drove me straight down into a major depressive crash that left me reeling for days (well, frankly, through to today still).

I've written about my struggles with depression in the past, and so in the name of continued transparency and hope that my stories can help others, I wanted to relate this fairly recent tale.

If you can't understand or identify with this story, I'm sorry, but that's on you.

Now that I've had a week to recover from the annual infosec circus event to end all circus events, I figured it's a good time to attempt being reflective and proffer my thoughts on the event, themes, what I saw, etc, etc, etc.

For starters, holy moly, 43,000+ people?!?!?!?!?! I mean... good grief... the event was about a quarter of that a decade ago. If you've never been to RSA, or if you only started attending in the last couple years, then it's really hard to describe to you how dramatic the change has been since ~2010 when the numbers started growing like this (to be fair, yoy growth from 2016 to 2017 wasn't all that huge).

With that... let's drill into my key highlights...