Rational Survivability

This month’s Information Security Magazine features the 2007 Security 7 Award Winners.  This year’s winners represent an excellent cross-section of security professionals in seven industries, each with very diverse and interesting backgrounds, approaches and career paths:

• Michael Assante, Infrastructure Protection Strategist, Idaho National Labs
• Kirk Bailey, CISO, University of Washington
• Michael K. Daly, Director Enterprise Security Services, Raytheon
• Sasan Hamidi, CISO, Interval International
• Timothy McKnight, VP&CISO, Northrup Grumman
• Mark Olson, Manager of IS Security and DR, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• Simon Riggs, Global Head of Security, Reuters

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!  I know four of them and they’re all excellent representatives of our profession.

I was one of the inaugural Security 7 award winners back in 2005 in the financial services category when I was a CISO and was interviewed over the phone recently by Michael Mimoso from the magazine as a "catching up with…" piece that complimented the profiles of this year’s winners. 

Please forgive the rather colloquial nature of the transcription of the discussion, it was very much a stream of consciousness as part of a 20 minute conversation that has been edited down for size.  Some of the concatenated sentences seem to contradict one another…I didn’t get to see it before it went to press ;(  Nonetheless, I appreciate the opportunity, Michael.

You can find the entire story here and my blurb here.  Shimmy, as big as a pain in the ass as you are, you’ll notice that I appropriately state that I owe my blogging to you.  Thanks, pal.

For reference, here is a listing of the 2005 and 2006 winners:

2005
    Edward Amoroso (Telecommunications)
 
  Hans-Ottmar Beckmann (Manufacturing)
 
  Dave Dittrich (Education)
 
  Patrick Heim (Health care)
 
  Christofer Hoff (Financial services)
 
  Richard Jackson (Energy/utilities)
 
  Charles McGann (Government)

2006
  Stephen Bonner (Financial services)
  Larry Brock (Manufacturing)
  Dorothy Denning (Education)
  Robert Garigue (Telecommunications)
  Andre Gold (Retail)
  Philip Heneghan (Government)
  Craig Shumard (Health care)

I’d also like to call out and pay tribute to one of the 2006 award winners, Robert Garigue, who passed away in January.  May he rest in peace.

/Hoff