Month: December 2017

Information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods, but the most popular form of security relies on encryption. So what’s encryption? It’s the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

Nowadays, it’s easy to buy and sell goods all over the world from your computer or mobile device. But privacy and security are major concerns, especially when sending sensitive information between parties.

There’s a whole lot of information that we don’t want other people to see, such as credit card information, Social Security numbers, private correspondence, personal details, sensitive company information, and/or bank account information. Encryption keeps those sensitive items safe from prying eyes.

History of Encryption

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a block cipher (a form of shared secret encryption) that was selected by the National Bureau of Standards as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1976 and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally.

Concerns about security and the relatively slow operation of DES in software motivated researchers to propose a variety of alternative block cipher designs, which started to appear in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some examples include RC6, Serpent, MARS, and Twofish.

The successor to DES was the Rijndael encryption algorithm, adopted by the US Government as standard symmetric-key encryption, or Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES was announced by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on November 26, 2001, after a 5-year standardization process.

Many encryption algorithms exist but the two main characteristics that identify and differentiate one encryption algorithm from another are its ability to secure the protected data against attacks and its speed and efficiency in doing so.

How Encryption Secures Communication on the Web

For many years, the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol has been securing web transactions using encryption between your web browser and a web server, protecting you from anybody that might be snooping on the network in the middle.

Here’s a simple explanation of the process:

1. The browser requests a secure page (usually https://)
2. The web server then sends its public key with its certificate.
3. The browser checks that the certificate was issued by a trusted party (usually a trusted root CA), that the certificate is still valid, and that the certificate is related to the site contacted.
4. The browser then uses the public key to encrypt a random symmetric encryption key, and sends it to the server with the encrypted URL required, as well as other encrypted http
5. The web server decrypts the symmetric encryption key using its private key, and uses the browser’s symmetric key to decrypt its URL and http
6. The web server sends back the requested html document and http data encrypted with the browser’s symmetric key. The browser decrypts the http data and html document using the symmetric key and displays the information.

Sounds complicated, but it works to keep those pesky cybercriminals from having all-you-can-eat buffet access to your information. And it makes sense to the computer, which is the most important part. Don’t ask questions, just be glad it all happens to your benefit.

For the rest of our Internet days, security and privacy will always be a concern. Why? Because there will always be a battle between developers who are engaged in improving security and privacy, and hackers who are seeking to undermine it and grab a quick paycheck. So stay vigilant, friends.

In an ideal world, we’d all have our work balanced perfectly with our personal life. If we had to go out of town for a business conference, we’d get the same amount of time off to spend with our friends and family, or just decompressing from that work trip.

Unfortunately, there’s no way that can happen in our heavy capitalist society. Always have to be earning that dollar in order to make it. And with that being said, one area will always suffer more than the other. Can you take a guess which one?

The good news is, there are ways to make the suffering of an imbalanced work/life situation less painful. Below are a few ways you can tip the scale into a more favorable alignment.

Always schedule things.

Work seems to commonly follow all of us home at one point or another. It’s nearly impossible to get away from, especially if you’re in a position of leadership or management. And every week, it happens a little bit more and more. Each day, it seems the hours spent on personal activities get smaller and smaller. To properly avoid this encroachment, schedule out your personal activities or pick up hobbies that are allotted a specific time—like coaching or a cooking class.

When things are written in stone, people are far more likely to stop the work they’re doing so they can show up to their scheduled activity on time. There’s a certain level of anxiety and expectation attached to a planned event, making it just as important as that work assignment. And coworkers are much less likely to ask you to stay late to finish a project if they know you have yoga at 5:30PM.

If you’re in management or a leadership position, make sure to let those underneath you know that you have a standing appointment each Wednesday (or whenever you’ve scheduled a personal activity). Employees are much less likely to call or text you with questions if they know they’ll be interrupting you.

The more you schedule out pre-planned personal activities for out-of-work hours, the more space you’ll be creating for yourself to disengage and not be at the beck and call of coworkers, bosses, or peers.

Tell others and create accountability.

If you think to yourself, “Steve, tonight you’re going home at five o’clock and watching a movie with your wife,” then you may or may not actually do that.  But, if you verbally tell your wife you’re coming home at five o’clock, then you’ve exponentially increased your chances of leaving work at five. Why? Because you don’t want to let your wife down.

When you tell others your plans, goals, or desires, a strange thing happens. You actually do it. Much like scheduling your personal activities, there is an expectation attached to it. In this instance, it’s not just your expectation but the expectation of people who really matter to you.

Write to-do lists and stick to them.

Oftentimes, your work/life balance starts to feel entirely unfair when you have too many work activities going on at once. Sometimes—not all the time—this can easily be solved with a proper to-do list.

The simple act of writing down what you need to do and then allotting time to each task can present you with the bigger picture. How overwhelmed are you really? And from there, you can determine what actually needs to be done by the end of today, or by tomorrow, or by the end of the week. This allows you to properly pace out your activities to give you a more realistic work day—one that ideally won’t creep into your personal life too much.

Career change statistics suggest that the average person will be making a career change approximately 5-7 times during their working life. Which means the likelihood of you encountering a toxic work environment may be higher than you think. Some believe that just powering through it all is the best tactic on dealing with toxic leadership, but there are some highly detrimental side effects that could follow you through to your next workplace.

Below are a few reasons why toxic leadership destroys your morale at a more core level than you may think.

Your voice isn’t heard.

When you encounter a toxic workplace where the leadership isn’t interested in ideas or commentary from the majority of the employees, you’ll start to feel unimportant and worthless over time. Maybe you spotted an area of quick improvement that wouldn’t cost a lot and would really help your fellow coworkers, but your manager dismissed you without even hearing you out. Maybe you completed a task and while trudging through it, discovered a new and more efficient way to complete it, but your boss just nodded and shooed you out of his office.

Consistently getting treated like less than a contributing member of the workplace will erode your self-worth and condition you to not speak up or think of new ways to complete things. Why bother? If leadership isn’t willing to listen or even give you the time of day, why waste your time trying to maximize the productivity of your work environment?

Creativity suffers.

Along similar lines, creativity takes a large hit when you’re operating in a toxic workplace. Because creative endeavors are not just black and white (like finance or sales), they’re vulnerable to more criticism and judgement. And when you have a toxic person in a leadership or management role, your creative side will begin to wilt. Toxic managers are prone to taking credit for things they didn’t do or have a part of, while pointing fingers and blaming others when their ideas don’t pan out.

Soon enough, you’ll find yourself unwilling to put yourself out there and stretch your creative legs. You’ve been taught by reprimand and criticism that new ideas are unwelcome and although you are the graphic designer or copywriter (or whatever other creative), you don’t know what you’re doing and need the helping hand of your toxic manager.

Years under this type of leadership results in a major creative block that could take a long time to unclog, even if you land your dream job in a healthy work environment.

Team mindset crumbles.

The general idea of taking a job is to be part of the team that supports the company in its goals, whether they’re monetary goals, growth goals, or support goals. In an ideal world, your teammates have your back, whether things go well or go south. Say a project flops horribly: in a healthy workplace, everyone learns from the situation. Everyone involved takes responsibility for their part in the project and a new strategy is laid out for future projects. No one is blamed, no one points fingers, no one acts selfishly or rudely about the project.

In a toxic environment, if a project flops, you can bet your bottom dollar that the toxic manager in charge of the project will go above and beyond to the executives that it was everyone else’s fault but his. He had no part in anything going wrong, and tried valiantly to steer the sinking ship to shore, to no avail. The employees just didn’t listen to him, he tells the executives. He would never have done things that way.

Getting blamed and having your abilities questioned is the last thing that will encourage you to work harder on the next project. Your sense of team unity has been torpedoed, and everyone involved is feeling the same way. Teammates are turning on each other in an attempt to save their jobs, when in a healthy workplace, the team would be working even closer together to make sure the same mistakes didn’t happen on the next try.

Why work for someone who doesn’t care?

Although we’ve barely touched the surface of why toxic leadership incinerates employee morale, the gist of the whole concept is this: why work your hardest for someone (or a company as a whole) that doesn’t care? If you’re suffering under a toxic manager who doesn’t listen, treats you like a number, and routinely blames everyone but himself for less-than-stellar results, why are you working there? We spend more than half our lives at work, toiling away to contribute to the greater good, and there are plenty of healthy workplaces out there that will stimulate your abilities and treat you fairly.

No job is perfect, and toxic leadership can develop anywhere, but as long as you keep in mind what’s important and know that you are worth more than suffering under a toxic manager, you can make those career changes confidently. No job is worth your self-respect, your creativity, or your morale.