Wendy Nather

Wendy Nather's avatar
Wendy Nather
wendynather_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink
npub1udn9...3tjr
Recovering industry analyst, research director & CISO. Senior Fellow at @AtlanticCouncil @CyberStatecraft. Single, childful cat lady. General Content Warnings: snark, bad words, even worse puns, occasional flashes of borrowed insight, plugging of selected $employer events and publications, random brain radio songs, multilingual commentary Note: Sufficiently advanced shitposting is indistinguishable from thought leadership. — nostr:npub1qr7v23t0hkjn8q5hcg8rq7ct64tc4w6gwzauwxarr45mhmgje6uqtju272 Stage: Vānaprastha Pronouns: She/her Chocolate: Yes please #ScalziRules: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/16/the-official-john-scalzi-social-media-faq/
📣 Help needed! For our upcoming #RSAC talk, @npub1d8w5...pc75 and I are studying cyber near misses, moments where serious harm was narrowly avoided, and what we can learn from them. These near misses might apply to software development, or to network defense. (Please boost for reach! 🙏) We are hoping to surface general patterns using some (anonymized) examples. If you’re willing, reply with a high-level response to one or two of these prompts. Anonymize as appropriate, and/or send to us in DMs if you prefer: * What lesson did an organization fail to learn after a near miss, even though it seemed obvious at the time? * Describe a time when you discovered something and thought “If we didn’t catch this now, it would have been baaaaad”. * Describe a time when you dealt with a software vulnerability in your systems that was being actively exploited elsewhere, but (as far as you could tell), not in yours. What saved the day? * What repeated “almost failures” do you see getting normalized or waved away as acceptable risk? * Can you recall a near miss triggered by a third party such as a researcher report, customer question, bug bounty submission, or vendor advisory that revealed a bigger issue than expected? * Can you think of a near miss where the most important factor was not a security control, but a human action like someone double-checking, questioning an alert, or escalating a “weird feeling”? Thanks!
“In a creative market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two mobile app stores, and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker extra rights to bargain with is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money.” - @Cory Doctorow
RE: For some reason my 21yo started reading philosophy; I don’t know why. She had already read some Camus, and I tried to get her the new collected notebooks, but the book didn’t come in in time for Christmas, so I got her The Prophet by Khalil Gibran instead. I can tell she likes it from all the sticky tabs she’s got in the pages. View quoted note →