Need for security-professionals in Norway

Yes, it's been an often-discussed topic in Norwegian media in later years:

"Lack of security-professionals."

Well, as commented in this (Norwegian) article, BY a security-professional; there seems to be a lack of security-oriented IT professionals, but, not because they aren't there at all. They are. What is seriously lacking in this scenario, is competence in recruiting firms looking for this kind of competence. Always has been.

Computer-security is not a fixed-set field, AT ALL. Even though a lot of so-called "professionals" seem to be stuck on the idea that it is.

Serious professionals wanting to work in this field on the other hand, are (often) painfully aware of what it actually entails to do so:

• constant refreshing on networking- / computing- / vulnerability-security in IT
• vulnerability-monitoring of often-used software in the company
• a simple awareness of the fact that: nobody is ever 100% secure

Computer-security is a weight-battle; does the securing of something vulnerable affect normal operations? Or, is the fix / security-measure absolutely needed for normal operations? These are everyday obstacles a security-professional has to deal with on a regular basis, so they have to be quite flexible on expanding their knowledge-base, and often.

These points are often completely missed by recruiters. They don't look for ability / knowledge / flexibility, they often tend to only look at academic degrees (preferably multiple(!)), gender, published articles / blog-posts and other non-related (and often quite unrealistic) demands for the position(s) in question.

Then, they complain about not finding any candidates for their outrageous requirements.

Seriously, re-define your demands / requirements to a more realistic degree, maybe you'll find a competent person to do the job. But you most certainly will NOT find the dream-candidate with the kind of demands currently set as standard.

Back 2 School

Looks like I'll be a student again this fall 😉 "precourse in maths and physics for engineering" 😏 after that, probably a BSc/MSc in Computer Science.

Yes.., I didn't finish any grade when I was attending private college earlier, it didn't work out, so I started working instead 😎

Now, I'm attending the University of Stavanger (UiS).

Spare time

Yet another period of contracting-work is now at an end. It was a good, solid 10 months :) New experiences - new technology.

Being able to join the starting effort at building something from the ground up is satisfying work :) especially as a technophile setting up core infrastructure and backend(s) for mission critical services.

As with all specialization; if the competence is hard to find, the need tends to round-robin back to the starting point again.

Good fun :P

What new adventures and / or challenges awaits?

Who knows... but I bet they're right around the corner ;) they always are.

Besides, now I have the spare time to pursue hobbies and interests again ^_^

Keepin' buzy

Been pretty productive (read: teh buzy) the last 6-7 months, doing some (quite heavy) service- and maintenance-work for a local IT-startup.

Been responsible for the x86_64 Linux-rack(s) based infrastructure and backend driving the various product-frameworks, the domain- and network-security, plus client host-security throughout the organization. Quite a lot of networking and some aggregated WiFi-APs etc.

The Linux-rack servers have also been host-hardened and properly secured (SSH/TLS/SSL) for the threats facing online services in 2015.

Without going into too much detail, it all revolves around embedded GPS-tracking, web-apps for viewing and controlling said- tracking system, and the accompanying maintenance / service / troubleshooting involved in said systems and their server-backends.

The servers run both the MariaDB and the PostgreSQL database-systems for serving application- / geo- / PostGIS-data in various parts of the application-flow. I became responsible for servicing / doing maintenance of and fascilitating import / export of SQL-data for backup(s), re-location, and the like. The PostgreSQL database is even served from an iSCSI pool through a dedicated jumbo-frame ethernet connection to a NAS-rack for extra speed when handling huge datasets.

I've also been playing around with the web-framework, doing some development for myself to learn the technology, and also fixing various components in the active applications.

The corporate environment

I'm sorry to say (not really, but I'll get into that later) that this looks like the last month I'll be working @ my current job.

I can honestly say I'm sick and tired.., nay, PISSED OFF at people with over-exaggerated opinions of themselves, driven only by their enormous power-seeking egoes...

Every time I have started work @ new office/business over the last 5 years, I almost certainly ended up working for these kind of people, which lately started to directly affect my work. And as a tragic turn of events, ended up giving the bastards more than one valid reason for discharging me, but they did not do so... Instead, they saw an opportunity to take major advantage of the situation and abuse my abilities to the fullest extent, while threatening with a dishonourable discharge if I don't comply.

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It's not that I'm ungrateful for the advantages I've been given or anything like that, but being told I'm not that devoted to my work, when all I've done for my employers is sacrifising my free time and also giving 110% at the same time.

Not being devoted enough? For Fuck's Sake!

Firstly, while I was given "flex-hours" (governing your own work schedule), I was stripped of the opportunity to work overtime, which in turn meant a fixed-rate salary every month.., no matter how much I worked! B.S.!

Then, in the 1st Q of 2009, my boss hired a P.R. consultant. This in itself did not do much in terms of working arrangements or anything. But, eventually, it became clear to me (and the lead programmer of the company) that this P.R. consultant was in fact, quite incompetent in our area of expertise.

And, as if this wasn't enough, he was endowed with the title "Staff Manager", and why you ask? Because he had managed a pizza-shop full of teenagers before he ended up at our offices.

Yes, a pizza-shop manager ended up staff manager at an IT company specializing in business-2-business, business-2-customer and electronic invoicing. Go figure...

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So, to show how much he appreciated my work, Mr.PR had kept an eye on me, the six months he had spent @work, noting non-standard conduct on my part, compiling a massive offensive. In my opinion, this is not showing respect. And not showing respect, yields nothing in return as a result, period.

You cannot expect to recieve respect, if you do not show any on your own part, *moan*-*sigh*, some people are just absolute fucking morons... no matter what.

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Just to clearify, I'm not whining because I might not have a job in 30 days. I'm generally pissed off because you'd think that grown men over 40-50yrs would be more fourthcoming and blunt about the whole mess.

But instead, they're fussing about what I'm costing the company in these unstable times, and that they cannot afford to keep my position any further.

So, either they had planned this all along, over a whole year! Or, they're just serving me bullshit to try and scare me to do something stupid to push me off the edge of my career, which is *NOT* going to happen.

I'll keep on showing up in the mornings to come, smiling ear-to-ear, tearing THEM down, day by day...

P.S. (14.08.2009 12:20)

I am not trying to act out a fit, or deliberately pissing them off with a clear conscience. Rather, I'm playing them at their own game. They can't fire me because they need me, and I can't quit because I need the cash.

Coincidentally, I've already been to a few job interviews, and to my surprise, this time around it wasn't really that hard to get them like so many times before. What with my newly appended CV, stronger and longer working experience and better understanding of business in general. Actually I find my self-entitled "unemployed period" to be quite tempering.

Kind of a blessing in disguise if you think about it =)

NAV / Jobb / Ledighet

"...venter doblet arbeidsledighet, nærmere 100.000 arbeidsledige ved utgangen av året..."

"...ikke siden 1988-90 har det vært registrert en like sterk ledighet som nå..."

http://www.dinside.no/807187/venter-doblet-arbeidsledighet

My job...

Yes, I will now try to explain exactly what I do for a living ;) but first, a little prologue about myself.

I first started doing paid work with computers when I volunteered for a community-job at a local youth-club where I lived at the time I'm referring to. Where I did everything from administrating websites, doing webdesign, handling the networking, webserver tweaking, email server maintenance, etc. I had this job for a full year until I got sick of it. Being an operator isn't as glamourus as it may/may not seem.

Then I worked 6 months for a major Scandinavian ISP company as a service desk consultant; answering troubleshooting questions, logging faults, reading for the CCNA exam (which I never finished, due to lack of interest), and a lot of other cool stuff that heightened my professional skill levels.

Now, I do what I set out to be doing, when I was still in Junior High, I make: web designs, web templates, web applications (php & asp), administer Microsoft Servers (not my kind of bag, but I gotta make a livin').

What this means in 'g33k':
I work with programs that provide interoperability in support of the move to coherent distributed architectures.

What this means in somewhat plain (computer-)English:
I work with programs that make business-trading more efficient by supporting enterprise application integration, which simplifies the exchange of information between enterprise software for the buyer, and the supplier. This is achieved by relying on non-architecture specific languages and tools (webservers, databases, AJAX,ASP) for cross-interoperability.

I never imagined I would end up doing programming and scripting for a living, in fact, it was the last choice I would have taken a few years ago... It's even the reason I dropped out of uni'. But here I am, and that's what I'm doing...and I'm loving it! ;D

Last nightwatch, monitoring network connections...

Yes, tonight is my last shift at a Network Operations Central (NOC). Tuesday I start working for a local webdesign/websolution company. No more working weekends, no more evenings and nights.

It was bound to happen sooner or later...me joining the masses of "nine-to-five".

At least I'm going to work with people more down to earth, since it isn't a big corporation. It's owned and run by 2 people. One of which lives in the same area I live in. Some would maybe say it could have it's disadvantages, but I see it differently:

• I don't have a driver's license, and the public transport available where I live isn't excactly tip-top, so at least I don't have to worry about getting to work.
• With just 2 people to answer to, I don't have to argue against a large hierarchy to express my opinions about work-related issues.
  

And for once in my life, I'll be working with things I've been playing with in my own time as a hobby. So I have quite broad experience with it. General webdesign with graphics and cascading style sheets are the subjects I enjoyed best @ school when I studied for a bachelor's degree in IT.

Working with Service Level Agreements in accordance with connection tracking, monitoring and faulthandling at an ISP, wasn't quite as I imagined it would be. At least not at a business level, in which I worked from august'07 up until now. It got to beaurocratic for my taste. Not that I don't value the experience I've had at my current job.

I've learned a lot about network topology (something I had trouble understanding when in school), routing theoretics and Internet backbones. And through a lot of websurfing and manual reading, I've also learned a shit load about network security; on the hardware layer, IP layer and on the software layer. And as a result, I've hardened security in both the LANs and WLANs @ my mom's and dad's places, and also my DMZ (publicly available domain, read: my bedroom ;P).

My experience gained working @ a NOC also gave me the idea of tunneling IP connections between two locations under the same WAN (ISP backbone), allowing me to serve my linux-machines located @ my mom's house (the DMZ), to a router I set up on my dad's Internet access that sports a public Internet IP address (with a DNS record) using Linux IP/port forwarding (Linux IP Masquerade, the Linux version of NAT) and OpenSSL/OpenSSH.

new_job: xhtml+css+gfx+asp?

Looks like I may be working a lot with webpages / backend scripting / design after my current work contract expires (out May'08 I've been told).

I was asked by a friend of my mother, if I were interested in working with webpage development / design some 3 months ago. As this is what I've always wanted to do, this is basically a dream come true. I went by their offices last thursday (April 17th), to see the server room, check out their systems and to see if I felt comfortably settled in at my own desk(!).

My work tasks will in the early stages be:

• HTML/XHTML and CSS scripting.
• Eventually, create/modify ASP scripts.
• Adapt functionality per customer request.

So far, I've gotten 2 starter projects to work with, and I enjoy it quite much :)