Region One hosted a Cybersecurity Summit for 2019 in Edinburg, TX. The event was free and I signed up to attend. It was a great event that had many great presenters. The theme of the summit was Cybersecurity on a regional level. Here are some of the talks I attended and the takeaways I got from them. Reduce Your Cybersecurity Risk and Get Complaint with SB 820 – Develop Policy: use already established policies as blueprints – Items to invest in: Malware protection/Endpoint protection, Firewalls, IDS/IPS, Spam Filtering, Log Monitoring Read more...

I have been using Firefox Focus for about half a year now. I came to use because I was using Chrome and simply got paranoid of what stuff Google was collecting via Chrome. So I made the switch to Firefox on my PC and started using Firefox for Android. Now before I started using Firefox Focus I was using Brave Browser for Android. Brave Browser is a Chromium based browser that tauts privacy for the end user. Read more...

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Since I have been reading “self-help” books my wife suggested I check out The Alchemist. Luckily she owned a copy, so I grabbed it from our bookshelf and stuffed it in my backpack. I gotta say that I really enjoyed this book. I can now see why so many people consider it a “self-help”, book. Here are a two of my favorite passages: My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer”, the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. Read more...

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg I had heard so much of Charles Duhigg from many “entrepreneurial youtubers”, so naturally I became curious of his work. Most people recommend his book The Power of Habit, I even remember a colleague reading it. But I didn’t find a copy of it at my local library but I did find a copy of Smarter Faster Better instead. Read more...

To help celebrate National CyberSecurity Awareness month the Information Security office at South Texas College created an “Escape Room” challenge. I got to participate in this years festivities. I like the challenge of doing escape rooms so one that had a cybersecurity theme seemed even more fun. The activity was quite fun despite not being able to “escape” in time. The challenge consisted of finding the decryption key to decrypt a computer that was attacked with Ransomware. Read more...

I was having a conversation with my wife and I said to her “You know, I feel like I’m getting dumber”. We both laughed out loud at my ridiculous statement, she then asked why I felt that. The reason I was l feeling like that was because I was simply spending too much time on other silly distractions. And no it wasn’t just “social media”, I tend to go down YouTube rabbit holes too. Read more...

Ever needed to reset your Windows password but forgot to make a Windows Reset Password disk? If so, you can easily reset a Windows Users password with a Live Linux USB. Let’s see just how easy it is to so. If you don’t a Live Linux USB go ahead an create one. This tutorial is Ubuntu based so any Ubuntu flavor will work. And you will need a working internet connection to download software. Read more...

Leaving social media So this week I found myself falling down a crazy rabbit hole. It all happened when I watched this video on the indieweb concept. I was hooked on the idea and philosophy of the indeweb! Just recently I had been putting a lot of thought on leaving social media behind. But of course in this day and age doing that is much easier said than done. Still I had this gut feeling telling me that I just didn’t want to be on platforms like facebook any more. Read more...