Sebastian Whiting | Security Engineer

Liars and Outliers - Headcount Matters

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 18:05:41 -0500

I recently finished reading Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier and it was not what I expected and in a lot of ways that is a good thing. (Disclosure: the book link above is an Amazon affiliate link — I may earn a small commission if you buy through it.) It is so easy to get focused on the technology and forget that at the end of the day, people are at the core of what we do. In his book, Schneier does an excellent job of abstracting the concept of security to a point where we can understand contracts and societal pressures as forms of security in addition to cryptography and EDR tools. This allows him to draw an accurate picture of the relationship between trust and security.

About Me - Sebastian Whiting

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 15:02:08 -0400

I make systems and people more secure!

I like to get my hands dirty where I can whether that is writing policy or code or doing incident response. Before I was doing InfoSec things, I was in the United States Navy where I split atoms underwater (submarine nuclear power plant operator).

View my Resume!

My Resume

When I’m not doing InfoSec stuff:

Hobbies: Weight lifting, hiking, and reading
Community: Volunteering with my church and local charities to help resettle Ukranian refugees.
Video Games: My top games recently are Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 but I’ve also been playing Rogue Trader and Palworld on and off.
Books I’m mostly a fantasy nerd, but I’ve been known to enjoy a variety of books.

Thanks for stopping by!

USS Olympia (SSN-717) pulling into Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This was taken the day I returned from sea for the last time! I would have been somewhere in the back 1/3 and definitely below the waterline.

This Site is Built on NixOS

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 15:02:08 -0400

My personal website was due for an overhaul (and in many ways a simplification) and I’ve been working around Nix long enough that I decided to build out my new site on it. Well, this is it!

At a high level, these are the tools I used:

DigitalOcean for hosting the server (configured with Terraform)

A custom NixOS image which I found directions for here.
Flakes for configuration.