Why do I do this?

I've watches this Simon Senek TED talk three times in as many days and it's given me a lot of food for thought.

He talks about the power of why, as in why do you do something. I'm not one for new agey happy talk and platitude pushing. Some of these kinds of speakers remind me of the Sphinx in Mystery Men. But this talk really got to me. It made me think about why I do what I do. Why am I in infosec? There are most days when it's a humiliating painful grind.

So far, I've come up with: I believe that most cyber-crime can be avoided.

Everything I've done in the past ten years stacks up behind this belief. I've consulted on security. I've sold security. I've lectured to infosec students and laymen alike. I've engineered . I've mentored. I even write a web comic about security.


I know there are some people in infosec because of the money, or the challenge, or even the (false sense of) power. Maybe I feel a little bit of all those things, but mostly I think that this hacking crap is far worse than it should be. And I want to do something about that.