After watching Rob May’s talk on the Human Firewall, I felt several topics he discussed resonated with core values and thoughts I have had before. It is quite intimidating when a stranger confronts you in public with information about you that is factually accurate. It immediately invokes a heightened sense of alertness and represents what some may call a contextual collapse. There’s somewhat of a struggle with the duality of humankind; we seek companionship, community, and communication with those of similar interests as our own, yet sometimes in pursuing those things, we provide more information in a publicly available space than we should to an audience we never intended, giving rise to the potential that it could be used against us. That situation evokes cognitive dissonance, or discomfort from wanting to be seen but not being surveilled. 

Another topic Rob presented seems all too common in today’s social media environment: advanced social engineering. With him, I as well could only hope that most of those cybersecurity “professionals” at that conference gave out fake information just to get the candy bar. The thought of that makes me giggle; however, the topic should be approached with delicate care because even if you aren’t providing a legitimate password, you’re still giving someone insight into what patterns you may use or how you think a password might look.

I feel like the “what fairy unicorn are you” and other personality quizzes are as old as the Nigerian prince emails, but as Rob stated, people still fall for stuff like that all the time. Think about it, why would someone collect the street name you grew up on, the name of your first dog, or your first vehicle model? Maybe because you used those as password recovery answers somewhere. We as humans are both the strongest and the weakest firewall that exists, serving as both the lock and the key. The same instincts that make us vulnerable- trust, curiosity, and generosity can also serve to protect us. “Cybersecurity is not an IT problem; it affects every individual within an organization and should come from the top down.” With this knowledge, we must take care in our actions and consider how anything could be used by someone with malicious intent.