What’s Your Favorite Movie?
The dreaded icebreaker questions I’m never ready to answer, but somehow I did
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I will just admit it. I hate ice breakers. You know those silly little questions and games you have to play to “get to know” other people.
One time our scrum master at Capital One made us all pair up and say something about each other’s shoes. What?
Whenever you take business leadership classes you have to take these silly classes that make you do things like trust people to catch you as you fall backwards into their arms. No thank you.
The first time I had to do a dip in a salsa dancing class because some guy dipped me backwards unexpectedly I screeched and the whole class and teacher stopped to stare at me.
Yes, I took salsa classes — for like four years. I always say I was like a basketball player trying to dance. But I did get to a decently advanced level and, kind of by accident, I took a salsa class from a man and woman who were like the national or international salsa champions or something from Cuba. It was very expensive and I didn’t realize that I was going to be totally (and I mean totally) out of my league. Oops. I think the teacher felt sorry for me and gave me free videos at the end, back in the day of CD-Roms.
I took salsa dancing lessons for the same reason I took Tai Chi for a year. To push me out of my comfort zone. Tai Chi didn’t work out. First I went to a session and some creepy guy paired up with me and said “Tai Chi is like dancing.” It was clear he had other things in mind and I never went back.
I took classes for a year with a private instructor at the kind of place where you have to bow to the masters on the way out the door after every class. He was very nice, but in the end when I was supposed to go in front of a panel to get my belt I started to mess up consistently. The instructor said, “Slow down, Ms. Radichel.” I said, “I can’t. It hurts.” I never went in front of the panel or got my belt. I was done.
As for salsa dancing, I tried to get used to dancing with strangers. I never did. I think I was a good follow because I never knew what I was doing, therefore I never tried to lead. But I was never completely comfortable even after doing it for four years except for with someone I knew well and even better if I was dating that person. Or I had a few drinks. :) I eventually stopped going.
So at some point I got invited to dinner with Werner Vogels and like 12 other CTOs one year at AWS re:Invent and I was like, “ME??? Really???” I was very nervous about the whole thing and didn’t even understand why I had the honor of attending. It made me so nervous before my talk at AWS re:Invent that year my hands were shaking. I’m not usually nervous when speaking in public.
I think there were only a few times when I got very nervous while speaking and that was one of them. The other was when I was completely shaken by something that happened to me at work unexpectedly and I felt like my life depended on the presentations I was giving. In the end, the stress was not worth it. And for the people that like to highlight your mistakes and shove them back in your face — consider the source. They are not good people if they’re doing that to you. You know who you are.
I guess I got invited to dinner with Werner Vogels because I ran the Seattle AWS Meetup which has lapsed a bit but thankfully there’s another meetup in Seattle you can attend. I hope to turn that into a cyber security meetup maybe but right now I’m exhausted and overwhelmed with things I need to do. So not at this moment and if I do it will likely be online or possibly in Savannah.
I later learned from another hero said that he was invited in a prior year. That was probably one of the coolest things I ever got out of being an AWS hero. It was so interesting to meet people from AWS and other companies and have a chance to really talk to them. I learned some things from the person who was deploying IAM in the Middle East and China, for example — so interesting!
At this dinner of course there was an chance to go around the table and introduce ourselves and a question was thrown in at the end — “What’s your favorite movie?”
Oh no! I froze. What’s my favorite movie? I barely watch movies. I used to like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as a kid. But that doesn’t really represent me anymore. But back then it was a lot of good harmless mischief. Until the Porsche incident, I guess. I was always the goody-two-shoes back in school but in the end, that helped me get out of being in trouble sometimes. People never expected me to do something I shouldn’t. But the things I did were so harmless compared to others.
I like James Bond movies but I wouldn’t say one is a favorite. They are just movies I liked. And it seems kind of cliche.
So here I am racking my brain for a movie, any movie, that sounds decent. Because I don’t know if I have a “favorite.” And then it hits me.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
And immediately I think, yes, that’s my favorite and before I can think about the ramifications of telling people that is my favorite movie who don’t know anything about me or why it might be my favorite move I blurt it out just as my turn comes.
After I say it, I think, “Oops, maybe that was inappropriate.” But Werner Vogels didn’t seem to mind. He raised his eyebrows a bit.
Sometimes when you tell people things that happened to you they are like, “yeah, yeah” as they prepare the story they want to tell you about themselves in their head. I didn’t tell my sister what happened to me as a kid until I was 35. Her reaction was, “Oh wow! That’s why you never trust people.” It was so mild compared to other people but exposed me to things far too young and led to this life of uncomfortable extremes.
The reasons I like that movie are not only because she’s a hacker chick who says what she thinks, or because she’s a misfit, but also because she kicks some people’s asses in that movie in a way I have wanted to do all my life. Not that I would ever actually do it. I just wanted to do it. Mostly I feel guilty later in life for not speaking up and I hope no one else experienced what I did. I should have stopped it.
Sorry if anyone finds that shocking, but you may not have been tortured with lack of trust your entire life due to things that happened to you in your past. And then there’s your experience with people. You start to think something good might happen, and then your hopes are dashed and you find yourself in a situation like Lizbeth throwing the jacket in the dumpster at the end of the movie.
After experiencing something troubling people may respond in different ways. For me, sometimes I just want to find the people that are doing bad things, root them out, and give them a taste of their own medicine. But I’m not that extreme so in reality, I just want to have them get caught and have law enforcement deal with them.
Maybe that’s why I, and some others, work in cybersecurity. To try to stop bad things from happening.
That is one of the core things I like about the movie. Beyond that I like the hacker scenes and the way she says, “I’m not paid to give opinions” early on in the American version of the movie. She’s just doing what she does and wants to be done with it. She doesn’t want to play games. She doesn’t want to make people like her. She’s just there to do her job. But she has a mission and a purpose.
Sometimes I feel like that, though sometimes I do get paid to give opinions. Mostly I want to provide facts. Here are the logical steps you need to take to prevent your next data breach. Or here’s what you need to do to fix that vulnerability in your system. Period. Don’t ask me what everyone else is doing. Ask me what you should do.
Then I see all this hype and marketing and people spreading uninformed opinions about security and I get a bit dejected. I wish there was less cheerleading and more real solutions. But what do I know? It’s been like this my whole life. I see things I don’t understand so I just put my head down and do my own thing. I love writing my own blog because people can read it and take it or leave it.
I already do this to some degree but I might focus more on what is causing breaches this year and how to stop them. Maybe I can get some books or tools out this year to give people more concrete help. I don’t know yet.
So many people are writing about how to be a “rockstar” or a “mentor” in security and that’s fine if that’s your thing. It’s not mine. I think my experiences were not the only things that shaped me in my life. I think some of it is just my mind and how I think.
I remember seeing all the little girls sitting around in a circle in like first grade and I was just coming out to recess. I didn’t relate to the fantasy mommy and daddy things the little girls played. I wanted to play softball or army with the boys.
But there was this one girl that was really “slow” as my mom put it. She kept trying to explain that this little girl was slow and I should be nice to her. But the things she did and said were so illogical I couldn’t stand it. And I couldn’t understand why it didn’t drive everyone else crazy as well. I saw her cheating off someone else’s paper. It was first grade! How hard could it be? C’mon.
This little girl was sitting in this circle with all the other girls and they were all having lunch together when I came out and I was basically mean to that girl. I know. I’m a horrible person. I know better now.
But my point is that at that young age, I honestly couldn’t understand how the other girls thought the things she said were funny or intelligent in any way. I don’t think they were just being nice, either. I think they genuinely liked her. And it drove me batty.
Of course, now I’m older and I understand the situation much better. I should have been more understanding and nice to that girl. But what I still don’t understand is how all the other girls didn’t see her for what she was and somehow she fit in better than me it seemed. They were all laughing and giggling at things to which I did not relate. I simply didn’t find them amusing, funny, and I wanted to do more lofty things.
I tried to arrange short musicals which sometimes we performed after recess because our teacher was very nice. I don’t know how I convinced the other kids to do it. One time I tried to direct a lip sync of a Cinderella record I had but people goofed around too much and it never came to fruition. I got annoyed, took my record and left.
That wasn’t the only time I didn’t fit in. I was coming up with all these ideas for a school project and was really excited about it and one of the girls called me bossy. That hurt my feelings. I wasn’t trying to be bossy, I was just excited about the project.
I stopped doing projects with the other girls. I only did projects by myself after that. I felt like I did things that were more complex but it was so long ago perhaps that was just my perception. At any rate, I liked my projects better than theirs and that’s all I cared about.
In the end, after all the girls blew me off for a while, they all started to get into a fight. There were two factions. One group of girls was mad at the other group of girls. Suddenly, both sides were coming and talking to me as I hung from the monkey bars and I really didn’t care about any of it. It just made me laugh. I listened to both sides and tried to reason with them. And sometimes that’s how I still feel as an adult.
I don’t relate to a lot of people. I don’t see how people can’t see through illogical statements of others. I don’t care to push my way into things, I’d rather do my own thing. I will listen to whomever wants to talk to me and can talk to anyone out of curiosity about their beliefs, opinions, personal history, or dreams and goals. But I don’t want to get involved in any fights. I hate politics. I can play the game if I must but I’d rather not play.
Sometimes, I feel like Lizbeth Salander. I know I don’t look like her on the outside. I had a righteous, Christian upbringing. I faced guilt trips and corporal punishment if I stepped out of line. I was a “good girl” likely out of constant fear so I may not fit the mold.
As an adult, my dad once said, “Please don’t dye your hair purple.” And I just looked at him like, “What?” The thought never crossed my mind. He was watching too much Fox news and had the mistaken opinion that I was a “liberal” because I wasn’t following their exact lifestyle and that all liberals have purple hair.
First of all, I am not a liberal. I am not a conservative. I am an independent. No party suits me at the moment. I don’t even understand how people get so wrapped up in parties that one hates the other. I don’t understand the cult-like mentality that seems to lead people into following the party line so much they stop thinking logically.
At least that’s how it feels to me, but I know people have their reasons, and have been surprised by how a staunch far-right Republican made me think about his point of view a few times. I like hearing all points of view except those that are clearly non-factual and illogical.
Secondly, I have no problem with purple or any other color hair. I love personal expression. I like Lisbeth’s hair in the movie and I used to like that woman’s hair in the Til Tuesday video on MTV. It wouldn’t look good on me. I just liked it back in the 80's. Sometimes I wish I could braid my hair into many small braids like all the amazing hairstyles I see in Savannah where the population was over half African American last time I checked. But I’ve never really desired to dye my hair purple so that comment was so far out of left field I didn’t even know how to respond.
I may look fairly conservative on the outside. But on the inside, sometimes I feel like Lizbeth Salander is portrayed in the movie for multiple reasons. And that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced certain things. Or maybe you have a different personality and can’t relate.
For some reason, today, I feel kind of like a misunderstood outsider that wants to just go into my back room and solve some security problems and write some code. And I wish people would read what I have to say and fix their security problems before it’s too late. Or give me a call through IANS with some architectural question — not what product to buy. Or hire me for an AWS and application penetration test.
But sometimes it feels like people just keep following the hype train or whatever the talking points are of whomever they follow in whatever aspect of their life.
I remember going to this student conference in Brussels in college and witnessing mob mentality first hand. People get wrapped up in the hype and follow a leader to do something — maybe a bit crazy. In that case it was to depants someone in front of an entire auditorium. And I was just watching them and thinking, “Why are they doing that?”
There were people from 21 countries at the conference who had never met before. I guess everyone was caught up in the moment, but I couldn’t relate to their behavior. Maybe it was a European thing? I don’t know. It just felt like people were following the crowd and that led them to do something perhaps they wouldn’t normally do.
Sometimes, like that moment, I feel like I’m watching the world from a bubble and I am an outsider that doesn’t relate to any of the people around me. I see these things I just want to fix but no one is listening. I am sure a lot of security people who know the ins and outs of the bits and bytes traversing the network feel like that sometimes. The people who are in the trenches with deep knowledge know and see things that they cannot easily explain and know what’s really going on — and I’m not talking about the people on the hype train who will will say anything to sell products, make money, or who are telling everyone what they want to hear.
So for whatever reason, I was reminded of my favorite movie recently and thought I’d write about it, and explain why I relate to it in some ways. For those who are looking for a PG rated movie, this isn’t it. Sorry. But then, life is not PG.
For some young kids they get to know just how not PG life is at far too young of an age. I appreciate that Werner Vogels brought a company on stage that is trying to combat that issue. Because it affects you your whole life. Perhaps it is not only that. But that is part of it. Maybe some of it is just a personality trait. I don’t want to be a cheerleader. I don’t want to “make people feel like they are at Disneyland” as I was instructed to do when I worked for a particular training organization. I really just want to help people fix problems.
Everyone else is free to do as they choose. It takes all types to make the world go round. I’ll just be over here in my little bubble thinking about hard problems in security, what to do about them, and writing about it. I hope it helps someone and maybe stops some bad people from harming others. Like Lizbeth Salander, that’s what motivates me.
Now, back to coding.
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Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2024
About Teri Radichel:
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⭐️ Author: Cybersecurity Books
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⭐️ Recognition: SANS Award, AWS Security Hero, IANS Faculty
⭐️ Certifications: SANS ~ GSE 240
⭐️ Education: BA Business, Master of Software Engineering, Master of Infosec
⭐️ Company: Penetration Tests, Assessments, Phone Consulting ~ 2nd Sight LabNeed Help With Cybersecurity, Cloud, or Application Security?
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