c/cybersecurity-ops

Remember when we used to manage firewalls with serial cables?

I was digging through my old junk drawer last night and found a Cisco console cable from my first IT job back in 2008. Back then we had to physically sit in a server room in Houston just to change a single ACL rule. Now I manage 150 firewalls from my kitchen table. Has anyone else moved fully to the cloud and still kept those old cables as a backup?

1 comments

the_miles•1d ago

That senior SOC analyst told me to stop chasing every low severity alert

He said 'you're burning out on noise, focus on the 12% that actually matter' and I finally stopped trying to investigate every single DNS query flagged by our SIEM. Has anyone else had to completely rework their triage process after getting blunt feedback?

1 comments

the_mia•2d ago

The hot take that's dividing my team: do we patch on Friday or not?

I'm the one on my team who prefers patching on Friday afternoons. Everyone else keeps saying it's a bad idea because if something breaks you're stuck dealing with it over the weekend. But in my experience over the last 3 years, waiting until Monday just means you're rushing through 20 patches with less testing time. Plus our monitoring team is actually more available on weekends because there's fewer alerts. I saw a post last week about someone's Friday patch taking down their entire ERP system at 4:30 PM and that's the exact nightmare they warned about. But I've also seen Monday patches get rolled back because the change window was too short. Am I wrong for thinking Friday patches are worth the risk if you have proper rollback plans and 2 hour runbooks ready?

c/cybersecurity-ops

Remember when we used to manage firewalls with serial cables?

That senior SOC analyst told me to stop chasing every low severity alert

The hot take that's dividing my team: do we patch on Friday or not?

Pro tip: Check your cloud storage permissions weekly, not monthly

Ditched SIEM for SOAR last quarter and it saved our team 20 hours a week

Got hit with a phishing attack at a coffee shop last month in Portland

Just saw a guy plug a malware infected USB into the work server at my local cafe

Our SIEM alert volume dropped by 60% after one config change

Got in a debate with a SOC analyst about log retention periods

TIL my firewall was blocking legit traffic for 6 months without me knowing

Is it just me or did patching get harder after Microsoft dropped those monthly rollups?

Just realized my old mentor was right about incident response logs

Walked into a NOC last month and counted 8 different monitoring tools on one wall of screens

Almost lost a client because of a false positive alert at 2am

Talked to a SOC analyst who made me question our whole SIEM setup

Am I the only one who used to think two factor authentication was a scam?

Our SOC intern mistook a test push for a real breach, alert fatigue is real

My boss told me to stop patching everything immediately...

Our SIEM went down for 2 hours and nobody noticed until a user complained

Had a chat with a pentester last night that shifted how I think about patching

Was skeptical about SIEM tools, then our SOC got hit hard

Can we talk about vulnerability scanning frequency in smaller shops

Found an old firewall log from 2018 in my home lab archive

The one alert I keep seeing misconfigured in every SOC I visit

Still think real-time log monitoring beats batch analysis for mid-size networks.