Scott Baker

A reusable bag... er... blog of stuff.

AI generated image of a creature

 

Yep, this is my little slice of the net, hopefully some of the information here is as useful for you as it has been for me.

(please don't ask what that creature is, I have no idea, just something that the AI spat out)

 

Screenshot of the infographic for MFA Fatigue - Summary of content is in the article
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Reactive) MFA Fatigue

Imagine this situation, you're in the middle of something important... perhaps a meeting or a lunch out and your phone just keeps constantly sending you "push" notifications asking you to approve a login. (Push notifications typically come from some sort of app on your phone like Duo or your banking app) It's becoming really annoying because they just won't stop! The only problem is, you're not trying to login to anything right now. What do you do now?
Screenshot of the infographic for multifactor authentication methods - Summary of content is in the article
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Proactive) Multi Factor Authentication

The benefit of enabling multi-factor authentication is that even if someone manages to get your username (which in many cases is your email address) and your password, they still don't have enough information to access your account and since the 2nd factor is ideally something that you have in your possession or are (a bio-metric) such things are very difficult from a criminal to get!
Screenshot of the infographic for protecting other authentication methods - Summary of content in the article
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Proactive) Protect Other Authentication Methods

For the most part we can all easily understand the importance of securing our usernames and passwords. However it can be easy to overlook all the other information that can sometimes be used to access our accounts. From your email and birth date to sometimes seemingly innocent reference numbers. It's just as important to secure this information as it is to secure your password.
Information page about password vaults/managers (details include in article content)
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Proactive) Password Managers

If you follow the rather important good practice of having a unique password for every account. You will immediately be challenged by the sheer number of different credentials that will be needed to authenticate with all these accounts. With these many hundreds of credentials (passwords etc...) you wind up with in our modern lives, password vaults/managers are effectively an essential. They also provide a host of other useful features. In fact, once you get used to having one it will usually save you so much time, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one.
Information page about unique passwords/passphrases
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Proactive) Unique Passphrases and Passwords

One of the single most important good cybersecurity habits is to use a unique password for every different account. While the concept is simple, the idea of using a unique password for every single account may seem daunting if you have never done it before. Keep reading for more information about why this is so important and how to do it without breaking your brain!
Information page about the Stop, Assess, Plan, Proceed protocol
Cybersecurity

Cyber Security Hygiene (Reactive) SAPP

Knowing what to do when something goes wrong can be just as important as working to prevent it. Anyone who has ever worked in any sort of first responder role (medical, fire fighting, or in my case Search and Rescue) will be familiar with the idea of following a well practiced protocol as a means to take appropriate action when an incident occurs. One of these protocols called SAPP (Stop Assess Plan Proceed) is just as applicable to a cyber security incident as it might be in the search and rescue context.
a cute puffy creature cradeled in the hands of a robot
Cybersecurity

Trust

Discussions about cybersecurity frequently include the word Trust. It may be stated on it's own or as part of other terms such as "Trust No-one" or "Zero-Trust" or "Trust but Verify"... I recently spent some time thinking about trust and how it relates to cybersecurity. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that a bit of a deep-dive into who we are trusting (or not trusting) was well worth the effort.

Invisible AI - the hidden threat from ML integration
Cybersecurity

Invisible AI

The cybersecurity risks associated with AI/ML tools are slowly but surely being documented and communicated. People are starting to understand these risks and consider them. However as vendors rush to integrate AI into anything they can cram it into, even beer! It becomes far less certain if you may be using AI and not even know it.
Portrait - generated by ML
AI/ML

LoRA Training (Stable Diffusion 1.5)

 

I have been playing with Stable Diffusion for over a year now and seen a lot of erroneous information online about how to train LoRAs (Low-Rank Adaptation). I've specifically been experimenting with taking 3D game characters and training LoRA models based on these game character images to create photo realistic images after they are passed through the Machine Learning Model (because it's really not AI at all!).

Scott Baker