Tarah Wheeler 🖖♦️ / is on Nostr

♦️ CEO of Red Queen Dynamics♦️EFF Board Of Directors♦️US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security♦️Senior Fellow, Global Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. ♦️ Formerly Harvard, Brookings, Splunk, Symantec. ♦️ I had the good sense to marry @deviantollam. ♦️she/her curmudgienne♦️standard disclaimer regarding personal opinions.♦️Searchable.

Last Notes

2024-09-09 23:55:42

This is a day where I’m LinkedIn-discovering a lot of people who are claiming to be cyber experts who’ve never held any role other than government policy or investment.
It vexes me when I’m brought in to mop up a situation created by people who’ve never touched a keyboard and yet somehow have been appointed to roles running government cyber policy development. I am greatly vexed.
Ask civil engineers who have built a bridge before making transportation budget policy. Ask doctors who have called a time of death before making medical policy. Ask survivors of abuse before making victim protection policy.
For heavens sake, ask a person who’s hacked a system before making cyber policy intended to fight cyber crime.
EDIT: if you’re in government and reading this and wondering if I’m subtooting you, I’m not. Anyone I’m talking about hasn’t ever heard of the fediverse 🙃🙃🙃 and I am absolutely shading them.

2024-06-14 20:40:23

So, today, a lot of folk are talking about how a very bad man named Sean Hastings has been violently threatening Adam Shostack for years and years.
I know Adam and think of him as a friend and we are connected professionally and personally, and of course I knew about Sean Hastings, but I was unaware that today was the day that Adam was going to finally talk about his nightmare, and he didn't ask me to say anything about my own experiences with Sean or coordinate with me on this.
I can't speak to Adam's experience but I do feel the need to tell people what Sean Hastings did to me.
The first thing Sean Hastings did to me was give me money in 2015. I didn't know him. You can actually see his name right in the front of the acknowledgements to my book on women in tech - because he contributed $500 to the 2015 Kickstarter I ran to fund it.
This is before I'd met Adam Shostack; Adam and I met in early 2016 when we sat on a Federal Trade Commission panel together in Seattle on startup cybersecurity. Adam's a major nerd and we bonded immediately over game design and his incorrect preference of Star Wars over Star Trek.
But soon, I would find out that there were strings attached to Sean's contribution. Apparently he thought that by contributing to a Kickstarter, he could turn guilt screws on me about who I could talk to, and demanded my time to help him publish books on girls in tech.
He began sending me harassing messages and emails after I'd probably RTed something from Adam, demanding that I pay attention to his claims about Adam Shostack. I did what any normal femme in tech does, which is go do the grey network check on Adam. In 2016, I spoke to several extremely prominent and trusted friends and members of the infosec community. The “Good Guy vs. Creeper” check on Adam came back from my folk with a resounding "Adam's the victim here". And I know some serious operators in the "keeping women in the infosec world safe" space.
Sean subsequently began publicly and privately bombarding my social accounts and email with demands and guilt and claiming that he was behind my success and funded me. This looked to me like a man who tries to control women and others with money, and I would wear out the red flag emoji if I tried to properly emphasize that. There's plenty more on Xitter if you want to go searching.
I didn't and don't want to think about this, any more than anyone else wants to think about awful things, but violent angry dangerous men like Sean do seem to operate on their own schedule, and I anticipate that Adam's public statement may trigger Sean Hastings making another outburst against me and the many other people I'm now seeing coming forward.
One last thing. I've experienced some of the same kinds of horrific stalker behavior that Adam and others in the community have, and while it's not relevant to this here, Adam was a profound support to me when my life was getting torn apart by two very dangerous, angry, violent people making false claims about me several years ago. He knows exactly what it feels like, because I think he's lived it for a couple of decades.
So, it occurs to me that I've actually continued to benefit from that $500 that Sean Hastings contributed to that Kickstarter. In my experience, it makes people apoplectic to learn that their money went to something that they hate. So, below, you'll find some screenshots, and the last image is my proof pic for a $500 donation just now to Operation: Safe Escape, which supports victims of cyber stalking and domestic tech abuse like those Sean Hastings has targeted. That makes me feel a lot better and I didn't even realize I was carrying any guilt over it until just now.
https://safeescape.org/ I strongly urge you to donate there as well if you were affected by this.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/616/672/056/632/775/original/a077d378378d557a.png
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/616/754/209/895/193/original/a67690ce0721531a.png
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/616/779/743/013/275/original/edf9e419a5d6aaf4.png
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/616/713/467/108/108/original/355da7fef47f6c2b.png

2024-06-04 19:44:23

#infosecjobs #hiring Alert: I'm hiring a career transition, entry-level, or intern-level web developer in Rust/Python at [@redqueen](https://infosec.town/@redqueen ).
We help managed service providers get and keep their small biz clients safe and secure!
This would be a great role for someone mid-career looking to move into a more technical role or into infosec, or who just finished a bootcamp or similar education.
Remote, US-only. Read the JD carefully or you'll miss the subject line requirement when you email me.
https://www.redqueendynamics.com/careers #cybersecurity #compliance #infosec

2024-06-03 02:38:48

“You’re going to a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters, people who talk at the theater, and the jackass who hacked and ransomedwared the Seattle Public Library.”
https://shelftalkblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/an-update-about-access-to-library-technology-systems/

2024-06-03 00:32:09

- reply

yeah, I have a great great grandfather who was a raging antisemite and we aren’t sure if that’s because he actually was Jewish. Would have been really extraordinary if he wasn’t…as his family would have been the only ones in their village who weren’t.

2024-06-02 19:15:34

Hey, today is a great day to call your oldest living relative or the relative that knows the most about genealogy to get some information that may not exist for long.
My dad started compiling our family history about a decade ago, and I’m doing a deep read of it now.
I’m mostly German-English-Scots. Scattered great and great-great grandparents named Wilhelm, Adolph, Matilda, Gordon, Donald, James. So fun to learn. And explains all those recipe cards I remember from being a kid at various families’ houses in rural Oregon written in idiomatic German. I saved some, like pfeffernusse, schwarzbrot und weisswurst :)
Whoa. One of my great-great grandparents was from now-Ukraine. Ever hear that there’s rice Europe and potato Europe? If you mashed all the potato Europe, you’d get me :)
Your family won’t be around forever. Ask the questions now.
Side note: there’s a moment in Band Of Brothers where they come across a German soldier with the most ice-pure Oregonian accent who says he had returned to Germany to fight for a pure German bloodline. If that had been real life, that could have been a fourth cousin and it was absolutely chilling to hear. So many twists go into making us all up and I’m quite glad some of my ancestors were too poor to make it in Germany and had to get on a boat.
If you call a family member, tell some stories!!

2024-05-29 03:44:25

OH: The year is 2038. Standards body participants have finally achieved their ultimate dream: the Ur-Format, a grammar subsuming YAML, XML, CBOR, JSON, JSONB, X.509, protobuf, Cap'n Proto, Borgconf, all dialects of CSV including non-Euclidean ones, TOML, and http:// Sendmail .cf. It is now believed, Mr Anderson, that we no longer lack the necessary language to describe your perfect world

2024-04-13 02:19:25

People who call your phone immediately upon receiving a text instead of answering a simple Y/N shall be first against the wall.