Events & Speaking

Two kinds of room, and neither one is a sales pitch.

Some of this is business briefings on rules that are about to land on somebody, and some of it is time in schools. The school work is pro bono and will stay that way. It is the part of this practice that is not a business line.

Pro bono work with schools and students

Free, for any school, district or college that asks. There is no version of this with an invoice at the end of it and no expectation that the school becomes a client.

• Career events and career fairs. What cybersecurity work actually looks like day to day, what it pays, and the several routes into it that do not run through a four-year degree. Students hear about this field mostly from television, where it is a person in a hoodie typing quickly.
• Classroom speaking. A single period or a full day, aimed at the class that is in front of you rather than at a generic audience. Computer science, business, law and civics classes all have a real angle on this, and the civics one is usually the liveliest.
• Small team mentoring. Working alongside a CyberPatriot team, a cybersecurity club or a competition squad and the teacher running it. Most of these teams are led by someone who volunteered without a security background, which is an act worth supporting rather than a gap to point at.
• Judging and advisory. Competitions, capstone panels, advisory councils, and reading a curriculum before it is taught.

Briefings for business audiences

Chambers, trade associations, peer groups, boards and leadership teams. Free to attend, and educational rather than a pitch: if a talk ends with somebody knowing what a rule requires and deciding to handle it themselves, the talk worked.

• Regulations that are about to apply to you. Federal contracting requirements, HIPAA, the FTC Safeguards Rule, and what state law already says about a breach.
• Cyber insurance, and why renewals got hard. What carriers now ask for, why they ask, and what a declined renewal actually costs.
• Incident response for people who are not technical. What the first four hours look like, who decides what, and which decisions cannot be made well at 2am for the first time.
• Tabletop exercises. Run for a leadership team rather than for IT. These can be a conference session or a private session for one organization.

Coming up