Grrrr!

As many of you know, I work for the Network Security division of a small telecom. On any given day we wade into an alligator-filled cesspool of hackers and lowlifes and people the FBI wants to find and people we actually want the FBI to find. (You’d be surprised at how often we tell the FBI “no.”)  Perhaps three times in my three years here, the Internet threat level has risen to “Holy shit!” proportions. We’re in one of those eras now. The Heartbleed SSL vulnerability is kicking our ass.

SSL is the security protocol at the very foundation of most of the other Internet security protocols. It touches a ridiculous amount of the Internet. It was the one aspect that was most trusted to solve security issues, not create them. One of the main programmers at SSL upgraded a version of SSL into production without fully testing it. That version contained a “Holy Shit!” exploit that ended up in subsequent versions. Now my company – an Internet Security Provider and backbone owner – is not safe and you –  internet user and owner of Android devices – are not safe. And we’ll just keep taking turns re-infecting each other until we finally get past this.

It’s a quirky little bug in that it has to be wiped out completely, on every platform and every server and every end user device, or it just re-infects.

Anywhoo. Work is insane. I don’t have time to blog right now.

It’s Wordcraft Wednesday, so I’ll take a second to say that I got good news from my agent. Not great news, but good news. Selfie is finally going “on submission” to the publishers of the world and there’s some interest. A big publisher is especially interested. We’ll see where that goes. It’s nice to finally perceive some momentum in this glacial process.

Be well and change your passwords. Weekly. Really.