[0:15]I make this look good.
[0:24]I'm Dr. Romeo Farinacci. First name Filipino, last name Italian. As you can see, I'm neither. I have a lot of fun with my name, truly. I love especially in interviews. I love when I sit down, waiting, and someone comes out and they ask for Romeo Farinacci. I love their expression on their face when this black guy stands up. It's awesome. But it's I've met a lot of people with names that just uh don't define them and it's really cool about that. Uh I met guys with women's names, women with guys' names, there are so many names that are gender, gender neutral. You know, Jackie and Bobby and McKenzie, and so and so forth. I had a resume come to me one time, the name was Jules Martinez. I kid you not, my expectation was a short Spanish woman. When the interviewer came to the conference room, I kid you not, I had to look up to the six-foot white guy from New York. Strong New York accent. Come to find out, his name is Julian, he just goes by Jules. But it's interesting how a name can no longer provide us an expectation of who you are. We can no longer and and it's an accepted norm that we no longer judge people by their name. You can't. It's just not possible. I mean, look at that name. Man, that says so much that is not me and it's crazy. I love it. It's a norm today. We no longer ask or question whether or not you are who you say you are. That's kind of the danger. Especially with the internet, the way the worldwide web is going, we can now be anonymous. We can hide ourselves. We can use the network and the internet to become anyone we want to become. The danger in that too is we put so much out there on the networking sites that we actually are living online. And if the bad people get a hold of this information, they can actually pervert what we are doing and who we are and actually change our image, change what we're trying to represent, modify the truth. Organizations are actually trying their best to control this. A lot of them do. That's how they market themselves. They show us exactly what they want us to see, so that we believe in them, that we believe in who they are and what they're trying to promote. We also need to do the same thing. We need to take control of these networking sites and understand how we can leverage them to give the truth of who we are. That's where we are right now. We need to make sure that when we control this, that we control the network and these social sites in such a way that we use it to define us, rather than the network defining us for us. Why am I here today? I'm here to talk about control. I'm here to talk about how organizations and how we as individuals can leverage control, leverage cybersecurity to allow us to do what we need to do to feel safe and comfortable. To allow our kids to use these devices. I'm not here to talk about or define cyber security. A lot of us already know. If we have an intelligent phone, we're already integrated in it. I don't know if you see what I did there. I'm not here to talk about how cyber security career fields are on the rise. How the skills for cyber security professionals is in high demand. No. I'm not even here to talk about how October has been declared cyber security awareness month. Still can't believe that cyber security has its own month. like, man, this just it's weird. But I'm here to talk to you. Mothers who have children using these devices, co-workers who see these pop-ups when they're getting to a website and it's blocking them and they feel like it's stopping them from being productive. Talking to nurses who manage patient data and not necessarily knowing where that data is going, not really caring. I'm here to talk to the average person who deals and conducts transactions online without a full understanding of how to implement and control what they're doing so that we can take control. Cyber security awareness is all about us taking control and embracing cyber security instead of looking at it like it's a hindrance. I have a 10-year-old. That's my boy right there.
[4:43]He did something for me that really just woke me up several years ago. I was sitting on the couch. I was playing on my phone, playing a game. He came up next to me and uh he was just watching. He's about five or six and he asked me this question. Did you download that game? As I answered him, I kind of stuttered because I had to step back. He used the word download at five or six years old. Not only is he using the word, he understands what it means. A word as far as I know, did not exist when I was growing up. And now I think about it, it's taken me degrees to understand how to use it and how to manage it in the workplace and at home. And yet here he is at five years old, who gets it immediately. Our kids today are learning about technology, learning about how to use these devices faster than we can imagine. It kind of scares me because as a parent, isn't it my job to protect them? And yet they're doing things with these devices that we are kind of naive to. Let's talk about parental controls real quick. When I was growing up, it was easy. Lock the door.
[6:08]And then my parents wanted to take it a step further, go to your room. It was easy. Nowadays, you can't do that not with the iPhones or the devices that they have available to them, their tablets. Today, kids want to be in a room. They're like, I'll go to my room, play my games.
[6:31]You know, and without knowing how to manage what they're doing, we're actually scarring ourselves when we're sleeping at night. I do, I know I do. I have to understand what he's doing, where he's going.
[6:49]When he tells me that I saw this thing on YouTube, I'm like, whoa, what else did you see on YouTube? When they're on these devices, they actually have worldwide reach, which is beautiful. It's great. We need the internet. We use it every day to collaborate, to share, to learn, to teach, to shop, to eat, in some cases, even to define who we are. But at the same time, there are malicious people out there who have that same reach. Your children in their rooms using this tablet with somebody in their room across the country, using the same kind of devices trying to influence your children. We need to understand cyber security so that we can put the right controls in place. Embrace cyber security so we can stop these bad guys from reaching our kids.
[7:54]Even at the workplace, a lot of us who are co-workers and we are trying to do certain things, try to navigate the websites, we get these pop-ups and we're like, ah, I can't do my job. You know, I want to today, I want to help change some of that. That's my goal. It's to change how we perceive it. I want to realize that we want this. We need this, especially at home. We need to take that at work and say the same thing, because parental controls at work is what the CEO is doing. He's putting parental controls on his systems to make sure that his company thrives. We need to understand when we see these things happening, that they're there for a reason. How many of you in here actually conduct personal business at work? Don't have to answer that. I won't. But some of us actually, there's an article actually says that some of us prefer to do a lot of these transactions at work than at home because the environment at work is more secure. It just goes to show how much we don't understand on how to secure and manage these environments at home. And how we don't really appreciate when they are at work. We're like, hey, it's good, it's secure, I can do what I got to do. But I can't do it at home because I don't know what security is, but I know they do.
[9:31]Security is not just about protecting intellectual property. It's not just about keeping the CEO out of prison. It's not just about ensuring quality elections are taking place. It's also about self-preservation. It's about securing your job. They have these boundaries in place, these barriers in place, I like to call them to ensure that you can do what you need to do, that you are as productive as you need to be at work. Without worry of sending something to the wrong place. Imagine as a nurse, you're trying to send patient data to the physician who's going to do certain activities. You don't want to send that patient record, that patient data to the wrong place. And hopefully boundaries are put in place to prevent that from happening. Those parental controls are in place to prevent that from happening. I want to change things up a little bit. I want us to think about something. I want us to consider what cyber security really can do for us at home and how it really secures us. I want you guys to embrace cyber security when I finish this talk, because it's about you and your identity. At the end of the day, it's about your image, it's about the company's image and the companies are already getting this. They know this, but we don't. We don't know what it's doing to our kids, to our homes. Think about bullying. 20 years ago, if my kid was getting bullied in school, I can change schools. Now, we can't do that, because all the bullying is done online. They're sharing it, they're downloading it, they're recording it. If I change schools, guess what? The information follows. So, we have to understand how this works and how we can control what we put up there so that we can control who we are, control our kids, control our families, control us. Consider this. Because I love how perception really, really weighs on people. Imagine you're driving down the freeway and a cop pulls up behind you. No lights, he's just behind you. How do you feel? Uncomfortable, anxious, worried. Now, imagine if you're being attacked, if someone is threatening you or your family in your front yard and a cop pulls up, just happened to be driving around the neighborhood, how do you feel then? Take ambulance, for example. Rush hour, traffic. I'm trying to get home. Lights flashing behind me, now I got to pull over. Now, how do you feel? Delayed, annoyed? What if it was a family member in which the ambulance is trying to get to? You hope it gets there as fast as it possibly can. Perception is important. There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. Adley's Huxley. Understand and provide awareness to what cyber security is, and we can remove or we can control perception that we have. So that we can better prepare our kids and prepare our companies for when we're trying to implement certain things, so they understand why we're doing it. We're not doing it to slow you down. I like this from Morgan Freeman. This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection. Think about the internet. Before the internet, none of us thought about protecting what we put up there, what we post on blogs, go and tweet, tweet. What do we do? How do we do it? We think about that. Now we have cyber security because of these malicious actors out there, trying to pervert what we're trying to do. Trying to bring us down and reduce our image to what we are not trying to show. I like to take this one step further. Cyber security is just like this internet security, we really got to embrace cops. Not cops, police cops, you know. I like this picture here. This is awesome. I had a CEO several years ago who really provided a very good perception on what cyber security is and he used this image. He said,
[14:30]Imagine cyber security like brakes on a car. The brakes on a car are not there to stop you. They're there to enable you to go faster. I was blown away. If you did not have brakes on a car, either a, you wouldn't drive, or B, you'd only go one mile an hour because that's as fast as you can take your left foot out to stop that vehicle. But now you have brakes, you have that comfort, that security to know that this will allow you to control your vehicle. Brakes allow you control. Wow, blow my mind. It enables me to go faster. I love that. That's what cyber security is doing. It enables me to do my job without worry of what could or could not go wrong. Cyber security increases productivity. I love that line. And that's one thing that I go everywhere, everywhere I go, that's what I do. I say that, I ensure that. I'm a cyber security guy. I love cyber security. I want everybody in here to love cyber security. It increases productivity. It's to me, it's no different than those Jersey barriers on our highway. It's there to make sure that the other people are going one way, I'm going another. It's what it's there for. It's not there to stop me, but it's there to allow me to think about what I'm doing. If I get a pop-up, if I get something that says, are you sure? It allows me to think about what I'm doing. Striking the balance between employee productivity and data security. It's pretty much what our job is, as security professionals. That's our goal. Our goal is not to stop you from going to certain websites. Our goal is not to stop you from interacting with third-party vendors that are emails can't get back and forth. Our job is to do this, strike that balance, because there are bad guys out there.
[16:44]I love this quote. That's not me, by the way. Knowledge is going to make you stronger. Knowledge is going to let you control your life. Knowledge is going to give you the wisdom to teach their children. Knowledge is the thing that makes you smile in the face of disaster. I kid you not, when I think of cyber security, I smile. I do. I'm crazy. A lot of people think I'm crazy. But cyber security, if you understand its purpose, understand its meaning, and what it's there for, it allows us to succeed. It allows our companies to succeed. It allows our children to use these devices and learn, rather than being afraid, rather than you being afraid. I put parental controls all over the place. I kid you not, my 10-year-old has no idea that I do. He's able to do all the things he needs to do, and I know what's going on. I know where he's going. And he's still able to learn, have fun, play games, and I don't have fear. I love that. If everyone in here, and that's what I want to leave you guys with. If everyone in here took cyber security for real, embraced it, really understood its meaning, and then learned about it, the little things. And it's very easy. Again, if you have a smartphone, some of it you already have. If everyone took it seriously from the government down, what would our presidency look like right now?
[18:41]Thank you.
