This is unduly personal and therefore beneath the standard this community ought to keep. Not cool.
The Equifax Chief Security Officer Received a BA and MFA in Music Composition
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Re: The Equifax Chief Security Officer Received a BA and MFA in Music Composition
#32This is unduly personal and therefore beneath the standard this community ought to keep. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's also fucking stupid. Peiter "mudge" Zatko from the L0pht, Stripe's new CSO, has a music degree from Berklee.
You can't criticize Equifax's CSO about her degree without revealing how little you know about the infosec field.
Re: The Equifax Chief Security Officer Received a BA and MFA in Music Composition
#33So from a CSO perspective, it isn't useful information what degree the CSO had. Keep in mind the level of experience that she had in the position. Not zero.
More relevant to the situation is the overall technical competence of the organization. For a perspective, watch Alex Stamos' talk "Appsec is eating security" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OTRU--HtLM&t=7s. The top 100 in the Fortune 500 are technical companies with technical culture. The others, not so much. He notes that the bottom 400 (he gives them a particular name) are likely to be doomed.The top 100 are serious technical companies or financial institutions.
Far more important to the security of an organization is the overall culture of the company and its technical competence compared to the degree that a CSO received decades ago.
One example. Is it not true that the bonus calculation of the Equifax higher-ups excludes losses due to breaches or legal or compliance hits?
Flip that around, and you will see a whole different level of internal culture.
Re: The Equifax Chief Security Officer Received a BA and MFA in Music Composition
#34This is unduly personal and therefore beneath the standard this community ought to keep. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's also fucking stupid. Peiter "mudge" Zatko from the L0pht, Stripe's new CSO, has a music degree from Berklee. You can't criticize Equifax's CSO about her degree without revealing how little you know about the infosec field.
Thanks for that.
The middlebrow dynamic has to do with assuming one knows more than one does and trying to constrain the spectrum of variation. Since unexpected variations are often the most interesting, that is a big bad deal.