Brian has been accepted as a candidate for the Master of Science Degree in Information Security Engineering. His essay describes the leadership qualities he values the most and how he has used them to lead his team in an information security services practice.

Russell Meyer, MSISE student at SANS Technology Institute, examines some common motivation mistakes made by inexperienced leaders and discusses how those mistakes could have been avoided. Russell prepared this paper for the MGT 421 Leadership and Management Competencies course.

Gregory Farnham has been accepted as a candidate for the Master of Science Degree in Information Security Engineering. His essay describes two leadership components: Vision and "Making your own Luck."

Emilio has been accepted as a candidate for the Master of Science Degree in Information Security Engineering. His essay describes leadership in his family life.

Whether you are a newly appointed leader with security responsibilities or an established leader, today is a great day to assess yourself. Make a new day's resolution to be more effective, to increase your personal alignment with the needs of your business and your group's effectiveness in serving your business. Great leaders are aware of their surroundings, and they ensure that their team and co-workers are also aware.

I like to think of a project plan as something similar to a recipe in a cookbook: it gives me the ingredients I need, and often includes a picture of what the finished product will look like. It gives me the steps in the sequence that I need to follow in order to create the final deliverable. Many times there are intermediate steps along the way, such as creating a sauce to be used later. You can think of these as milestones. As a manager, when someone asks you to review a project plan, it is strongly advised that you give it the cookbook test.

As computer security managers, we need to honestly understand our capacity for effecting change. We need management skills, security skills, and a track record of putting them to use. Our chance of effecting change in ourselves is much higher than with others, so here we explore some meaningful and practical steps to assessing one's self as a manager.

I recently saw a press release indicating that SecureWorks has added a managed log retention service in partnership with an industry-leading log management solution provider LogLogic(R), to provide enterprises with comprehensive log aggregation, retention, searching and reporting. This is interesting: four or five years ago there were only a few log management vendors, LogLogic being one of them, and today there are a dozen, but I had not thought of this as a service.

Many projects fail due to cost overruns, falling behind schedule, and so forth. We can reduce the risk of project failure by investing some time in up front planning before we start. A key to success in project management is to identify all stakeholders and ensure that they clearly understand and support what the project should achieve.

Kevin Bong, MSISE student at SANS Technology Institute, discusses what a manager should do when she suspects the employee is unable to perform a task due to lack of skill or knowledge. Kevin prepared this paper for the MGT 421 Leadership and Management Competencies course.

How do you learn to be a technical writer? There are many programs, but the short answer is that you have to write, a lot, and your work needs to be reviewed by someone qualified to review technical security material.

One of the important Operations Security tasks is to determine your organization's exposure to search engines. In the same way, you want to use search engines like Google to gather information about your competition. The most important thing we need to do in a search is to reduce the number of findings. So many times Google will return with over a million pages and this will only get worse as the Internet continues to grow. This first set of operators helps you narrow your search and then we will show a series of commands to find additional information.

Slides and notes from Stephen Northcutt's keynote presentation on the "12 Laws of IT Power".

There are many and varied reasons for a student to apply to graduate school. If you are accepted, you can expect to make a sizable investment in time, energy and money to complete the program. To protect you, and to remain true to our mission statement, the admissions office asks you to complete an Outcome Statement as part of the admissions process.

The Leadership lab came across an interesting company, Itiva. Their CTO, Dr. Robert Arn, was kind enough to share his time and thoughts with our readers, and we certainly thank him for his time.

Confusing language in California's AB779, which has gone to the Governor for signature, forbids merchants from retaining certain payment data. It smacks of a legislature precisely dictating technology. When a legislature dictates technology, it risks misunderstanding. It stifles innovation, and raises problems as technology evolves.

Jason Fossen describes the advantages of PowerShell, a welcome change from Microsoft, making it the future of command line administration and scripting for Windows.

Windows PowerShell is both a command-line shell (powershell.exe) and the name of a scripting language and is intended for network administrators, not professional programmers; it will eventually replace the CMD shell (cmd.exe) and VBScript as the most popular shell and scripting language for Windows.

T. Brian Granier is the second graduate of the SANS Technology Institute, a post graduate information security college. Stephen Northcutt had an interview with Brian to get more of his story about the experience of earning his degree from STI.

Charles Edge talks with Stephen Northcutt about security issues in the Mac world; even though the core OS is pretty safe, there are vulnerabilities that every Mac user should be aware of.

Personal branding is what prevents you from being a commodity and receiving commodity pay. It's why people want to hire you, work with you, have lunch with you, and generally associate with you. Your personal brand prevents you from being outsourced, ignored, or easily replaced. It's why you are not just another cog in the machine. Your personal brand is the unique value you bring to the table.

The effective manager has to be brutally honest with themselves, and understand their mindset and their ability to effect change. As you work through the abundance of budgetary, technical, and management information in your profession, it is important to understand where you are now and where you need to grow. This will help you to periodically develop a "short list" of things you want to ask, change, or implement.