Human Behavior

When the monster in the nightmare is you – Albany Times Union

Monsters are a staple of nightmares.

Recently I dreamed I surreptitiously listened in to a phone call between my wife and our dentist. The hushed conversation was frustratingly hard to make out. But I got the gist: he was commiserating about her husband being a monster. One with no clue. I did hear the phrases repulsive personality and pain in the ass.

Was it true? Should I confront my wife about what Id heard? How could I deal with this at all? My life was shattered!

I was jolted awake.

The trigger for this nightmare was immediately obvious. Id just been reading Robert Sapolskys bookBehave, a scientific examination of all the factors influencing human behavior. Specifically, the chapter discussing the famous Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.

In Milgrams, most subjects complied with orders to administer to others what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks. Zimbardos was the Stanford Prison Experiment with students role-playing as prisoners and guards. Here too the behavior was appalling.

We know some people are monsters. But does everyone have a monster lurking just below the surface? Sapolsky quotes Solzhenitsyn that the line between good and evil runs through every heart.

The apparent lesson of both experiments is that human behavior is very much shaped by context and circumstances. Put us in extreme circumstances, and extreme behavior will often be forthcoming. Though not always; some people have the self-possession to rise above circumstances. But most of us are not saints or angels.

Naturally, reading such stuff causes soul-searching. Hence my nightmare. Maybe, contrary to that nightmare, Ive lived my life admirably. But if so, perhaps its thanks less to my character than my circumstances. Its easy being Mister Nice Guy when everything is going nicely. Ive never really been tested. Would I press the button to deliver severe pain in Milgrams experiment? Would I brutalize prisoners in Zimbardos? Id like to think not. But one cant feel sure.

We also know that people in groups can be influenced to do things they individually never would. Thus lynch mobs. But a much greater phenomenon is people in groups creating civilization.Its purpose is to make our lives better mainly by curtailing the kinds of circumstances that cause people to behave badly toward each other, and expand those like Ive experienced, increasing the likelihood that even a non-saintly person can go through life rarely behaving Zimbardoic or Milgramy.

This isnt just a matter of affluence (though it helps; poverty can confront people with rotten choices). I dont think the propensity to push Milgrams shocker button correlated with income. What civilized society does is to create the structures wherein people can trust each other, with a basic bargain that you dont harm others and they dont harm you. In contrast to the Hobbesian state of nature with its war of all against all.

Of course its not perfection. Civilization, in all its complexity, does create some individual roles conducive to bad behavior. Some people are in fact tasked as prison guards. More generally, any sort of power can be problematic. And sometimes an entire society can become Nazi Germany. But thats never been true of human civilization as a whole. It defeated the Nazis. And while the line between good and evil may go through every heart, theyre not equally partitioned. For most of us, the bad side of the line is dwarfed by the good.

And civilizations big picture is an upward climb, organized ever better to achieve that. A slow fitful climb through most of history, but accelerating in modern times, with ever more people enjoying the benign circumstances of life that enable us to expand the good sides of our hearts and confine the bad to ever smaller precincts. So the better angels of our nature prevail.

But the climb does not go in a straight line. There was Nazi Germany. And there is Trumps America where, for too many people, the better angels of their nature are succumbing to their demons. Whether our own downward spiral can be reversed remains to be seen.

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When the monster in the nightmare is you - Albany Times Union

Human Behavior

Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches – Yahoo Finance

As Account Takeovers Continue for Office 365, controlling Risk Remains the Top Concern for Organizations Adopting Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Models

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 11, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Cyber risk is becoming an escalating concern for organizations around the world, and Office 365 data breaches are at the forefront. Even with the rising adoption of incremental security approaches like multi-factor authentication, access controls continue to be circumvented. In fact, 40% of organizations suffer from Office 365 account takeovers. As these data breaches make headlines with growing consistency, the resulting financial and reputational costs mount.

It is far too easy for an attacker to manipulate human behavior and gain high privilege access to business-critical SaaS resources. According to Microsoft's Q3 FY19 earnings call, there are more than 180 millionmonthly users on Office 365.With so many users, 100% cyber hygiene becomes impossible. To make matters worse, teams continue to struggle to keep up with weekly vendor-driven configuration changes and new best practices. And once an initial foothold is gained in a SaaS application, it is just a matter of time before they laterally move and cross into other parts of the infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, amassive number of alerts are flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs), forcing analysts to spend time manually analyzing and prioritizing which ones deserve attention. This is overwhelming security analysts' time and organizations' security budgets. As threat actors become more efficient at dodging and targeting the enterprise, most analysts simply can't keep up.

"Attackers will follow a path of least resistance and the convergence of these elements makes exploiting the cloud easy for them.In no other construct is it fair to expect a person, or security team, to be correct 100% of the time. This is an unacceptable expectation and entirely unfair to security teams," said Vectra CEO Hitesh Sheth. "The last thing we want is to create more work for security teams. What is needed is technology that removes the dependency on human behavior and human error and brings control back to the security team. This is what Vectra can provide."

Credential abuse is the leading attack vector in SaaS, especially for Office 365. In an effort to help organizations securely and successfully protect their applications, Vectra AI, the leader in network threat detection and response (NDR), is announcing the launch of Cognito Detect for Office 365. Backed by new detection models focused on credentials and privilege in SaaS applications, Vectra expands cloud coverage from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and extends the ability totrack attacker activity pivoting between on-premise, data center, IaaS and SaaS. Given that attackers don't operate in silos, a security solution shouldn't either. Vectra delivers the complete visibility across your deployment footprint that leaves attackers without a place to hide.

"Prevention technology has long been available and continues to evolve, however, it doesn't guarantee that data is safe. The real growth has been in detection and response capabilities, which have been long missing from most organizations' resources," continued Sheth. "We are the first and only NDR to apply privilege-based detections in SaaS applications. Our AI-driven solution seamlessly ties into your existing Office 365 deployment, and detects privilege-based attacker behaviors, giving you full visibility into your SaaS deployments. We continue to be at the forefront of security by detecting privilege abuse behaviors across the entire lifecycle of an attack in the cloud."

For more information, visitvectra.ai.

About VectraVectrais the leader in network detection and response from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognitoplatform accelerates threat detection and investigation using AI to enrich network metadata it collects and stores with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers three applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Cognito Streamsends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Cognito Recallis a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. And Cognito Detectuses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed. For more information, visitvectra.ai.

Media contactJohn KreuzerLumina Communications for Vectravectra@luminapr.com

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Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches - Yahoo Finance

Human Behavior

A Discussion with Mike Basevic On Challenging Yourself Everyday and Living Life to the Fullest – Thrive Global

Coach Mike Basevic, Owner and Founder of NoLimits Nations began his journey to study human behavior, after his life cameto a crossroads. He realized he was extremely passionate about helping peoplereach their full potential in life. That is where the No Limits Nationsdivision Anxiety Free Executive came into effect. This program is one of thetop programs around the world and is set to help eliminate the struggles thatcome with anxiety and depression.

These ideas were all constructed from Coach MikeBasevics past experiences of having to deal with trauma, conflict, anxiety anddepression. He realized that life did not have to revolve around the negativethings that could potentially be going on. It was hard for him to initiallygrasp how someone who was so committed in life to be the best and to work thehardest, was still able to spiral downwards. Coach Mike decided that he wastired of constantly having these train of thoughts, which ultimately fueled hisinitial interests when it came to the cognitive science of human behaviour.

Chicagos Mike Basevicbegan a two-year period of reading over 250 books about the behaviouralsciences. If there was a book written about mental health, self-help or humanbehavior in general, he would instantly want to read it. It is important foreveryone to feel as though they can live life to the fullest and most positivepotential.

What do you love most about the industry you are in?

The thing I love the most about the industry I am in, isthat my daily life involves helpingothers. My skills allow me to assist others through whatever issues theymight be dealing with, as well as the mental pain they could be exhibiting.With the issue of mental health being a more focal topic in todays climate, itmakes my job that much more exciting. Each day I amconstantly looking for ways to eliminate peoples pain, while also maximizingtheir daily levels of productivity. We want everyone to leave the programfeeling like their best self.

How do you motivate others?

Overall, I like to refer tomyself as a coach. And as a coach, it is my responsibility to motivate myclients; whether it comes to physicalactivities, personal hardships, or their work life. Itis a part of the job to help instill within them the hope that they can turntheir lives around for the better. Any great coach should have the ability tomotivate people. When you motivate people, you are giving them a better senseof direction, higher levels of clarity and an overall vision of how they wanttheir lives to look. One of the most important things would be taking thosesteps of action and change, which can in turn allow someone to feel betterabout themselves and their situation. When people find things that inspirethem, then in turn become more motivated to achieve their goals. For everyoneto be motivated, it is not always the same. Sometimes as a coach, you need toinstill a tough love mention. It is sometimes about the accountability piece ofthings that is the most important. When they realize that they must beaccountable to their coach and complete these exercises required, it pushesthem to do it. In general, its a proven process that by giving people thatextra push, you will witness results.

Who has been a role model to you and why?

Within my lifetime thus far, Ihave had several role models. From teachers, to professors, to bosses to fellowcolleagues; there has always been someone in my life to act as a role model anda mentor for me. I remember my first job in the hotel industry, my boss was agreat mentor and provided me with key tools that I continue to utilize in myeveryday life. I was a young entrepreneur starting and had a lot of drive andinspiration that helped me overcome many obstacles that were in my way. It isimportant whether I was coaching athletes, salespeople, or entrepreneurs, thatI was always looking for ways to learn and grow as an individual and a coach. Ibelieve if you want to grow in any profession, its important to remaincoachable. I would take what I learntfrom people and apply it to my everyday life, in order to keep achieving thepersonal and professional results I wanted.In my personal life, my rolemodel has always been my grandfather; he has been someone I always aspired tobe. He was always such a giving individual and led with his heart. He left abig mark on me and showed me what it means to be accepting of people and beingkind to everyone.

What suggestions do you have for someone starting in your industry?

A suggestion that I would recommend to anyonestarting out as a transformation coach of any type would be that the profession is a behavioral craft.That means that it is imperative for people to take the time to learnand study human behavior for self-improvement.I think the job is more than just people who read a book and become inspired todo more towards improving peoples lives. It is important to put in the timeand learn the practice. It is about ensuring that not only are you motivatingpeople with techniques and practices that work and get results, but that youare also practicing what you preach and putin the work it takes to help others achieve their higher purpose in life. People in the fieldneed to master the craft before passing their knowledge onto others. This fieldcan potentially continue to be littered with people who do not have thenecessary experience. It is about learning and spending time around those whoyou can learn from yourself and then you can move forward with teaching it toothers.

What is your biggest accomplishment?

My biggest professional accomplishment to date would be building my company from the groundup and being able to positively impact thousands of people in the process.I held onto the vision for many years, until I wasable to know exactly how to help people. It was about having the drive anddesire to purpose this, without quitting. Now, I can impact lives daily andthat feels amazing! I have found my purpose and am living it everyday.

For a personal accomplishment, that would have to be beingable to raise my children and seeing them prosper. Through my turmoil, I was able to gain the experiences to make me abetter coach today. Regardless of what wastranspiring in my life, I was always striving to be the best parent I could be.I wanted to ensure I could raise my kids to be good people with values andmorals. Now my children are in their college years and are thriving! I lookback at all my past experiences and am thankful for the consistency that myfamily always brought to me.

Outside of work, what defines you as a person?

I would say what defines me, is that I always try to accepteveryone for who they are. Everyone has a history, and alot of people are always battling with something internally.Therefore, it is important to be kind to asmany people as you can. Not knowing what someone else is going through,extending a higher level of kindness those are things that everyone should be doing. Its all about ensuring that your inner circle is filled with good people and have greatvalues. I think its important to be a glasshalf full kind of individual. Life conditions us to be miserable and afraid, soits necessary to feed your mind and soul withgood food and people. I strive to make myself a better person on a dayto day basis.

Where do you see you and your company in 5 years?

Our main objective is growing our outreach. We want to bemore than 10 times the size we are currently. It is important for us tocontinue to work towards these goals, because it will be a very excitingmountain that were going to have to climb. The program No Limits Nation isoffering clients the most impactful and beneficial services. It is the constantexpansion process and trying to really tap into a younger audience. Ideally,overall just to be 5x as big because that means we are impacting 5X more people.

Explain the proudest day of your professional life.

The proudest moments of my professional life are when Iput this program together, brought it to people that needed it the most andstarted to witness the dramatic change it was making on their lives. Thetestimonials that I get from clients daily are not only inspiring but are alsoextremely motivating. There is just a certain level of satisfaction I get frompositively impacting the lives of people were once lost at a point. Giving themthat reassurance that they can get back on track in their life with a littlehelp is always a phenomenal feeling. Just knowing we can make a difference isalways a plus.

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A Discussion with Mike Basevic On Challenging Yourself Everyday and Living Life to the Fullest - Thrive Global

Human Behavior

Suicidal ideation is decreasing among LGBTQ youths in the U.S. – Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY Suicidal thoughts and behavior are declining among LGBTQ youths in the United States, according to two studies published Monday in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The studies did not attempt to determine the cause of the decline. But Julia Raifman, an assistant professor of health policy at Boston University who led one of the studies, said stigma expressed by family members, peers or state level policies is highly associated with suicide attempts among LGBTQ youths, and a growing culture of acceptance in the U.S. could be saving kids lives.

Raifman and her colleagues analyzed data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey in seven different states including Maine, Illinois and North Dakota. They found the number of high school students in those states who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or unsure doubled between 2009 and 2017, from 7% to 14%. During that same time period, suicide attempts among those kids declined from 27% to 20%.

Another study, led by Richard T. Liu, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, looked at Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey data from Massachusetts, the first state in the U.S. to survey students about sexual orientation and behavior beginning in 1995. That data showed that not just suicidal ideation, but suicide plans and attempts have decreased significantly among sexual minority youths over the past several decades in that state.

Neither of the studies considered Utah, which has the sixth highest suicide rate in the country, according to 2017 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thats because historically, Utah has not collected data on teens sexual orientation. Last year, the state added questions to the biennial SHARP survey that allowed researchers to measure youth suicidal ideation as it relates to sexual orientation for the first time.

Even though Utah does not have any long-term data on LGBTQ youth suicides, Troy Williams, executive director of the LGBTQ rights advocacy group Equality Utah, is confident Utah is headed in the right direction.

As we continue to foster a community of inclusion and belonging, we will see Utah suicide rates decline dramatically, he said.

Both of the new studies highlighted the fact that while suicidal ideation rates are declining overall, disparities persist, and LGBTQ youths remain at a higher risk.

Raifmans study showed gay, lesbian and bisexual students were nearly four times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual students.

As human beings, we are hardwired to belong and to have deep connections, said Williams. When LGBTQ youth are exiled from their families, or schools or their jobs because of who they are, that leads to alienation, isolation loneliness all the factors that increase the risk suicide.

2019 was the first year that Utah collected data on sexual orientation and gender identity from eighth, 10th and 12th graders as part of the statewide SHARP survey, administered every two years by the Department of Human Services.

According to the results of that survey, gay and lesbian teens in Utah were more than twice as likely as their heterosexual classmates to say they felt sad or hopeless every day for two weeks or more.

Fifteen percent of heterosexual students said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year, compared to 48% of gay and lesbian students who said the same thing. Bisexual students were even more at risk, with 68% saying they felt sad or hopeless every day for two weeks or more and 53% saying they had seriously considered suicide.

We dont have any good comparisons to say whether those numbers are going up or down, said Michael Staley, suicide prevention research coordinator with the Utah Department of Health. Because we just now got this data for the first time.

Staley said discussions about adding questions on sexual orientation and gender identity to the SHARP survey started back in 2015, but the survey is optional and multiple school districts said they wouldnt administer the survey if the questions appeared. In 2019, 39 out of 41 school districts participated in the survey.

Some Utahns feared that if students were asked about their sexual orientation, it would cause more to identify as LGBTQ, said Stephanie Larsen, the CEO of Encircle, an LGBTQ youth and family resource center with locations in Provo and Salt Lake City.

In Utah, theres been a sense of not wanting to look at the numbers if we dont look at the numbers, the problem will go away, or it wont reflect poorly on us as a state, said Larsen. It is crucial that we be willing to look at what we can do better.

Larsen is a member of Gov. Gary Herberts youth suicide task force, which was launched in 2018 after 42 Utah kids ages 10-17 died by suicide the year before.

So far, the task force, which is made up of suicide prevention advocates, health care professionals and religious leaders, among others, has had good conversations but made little progress, said Larsen. She hopes the states focus will broaden from simply promoting resources to help people in crisis, to considering the root causes of suicidality as well.

I still think we have a long ways to go, she said.

Williams, who resigned from the Governors task force last year over disagreements about a bill banning conversion therapy, is heartened by the states recent move to prohibit conversion therapy for youths via therapist licensing rules.

Cathy Davis, suicide prevention specialist for the Utah Department of Education, said a 2019 state bill that called for expanded suicide prevention programs has helped schools create more accepting environments for students.

And Staley has spent the last year gathering new data for the Utah Youth Suicide Research Project, which he hopes will end up being one of the most comprehensive studies on youth suicide in the world.

I think a lot of people came around to understanding just how important it is to study these things and really get the facts, Staley said.

We can see there are disparities in suicide attempts, said Raifman. But its impossible to study these disparities and how to address them unless we collect data on who is LGBT.

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Suicidal ideation is decreasing among LGBTQ youths in the U.S. - Deseret News

Human Behavior

Kunal Shah on the jobs that will define India’s future – Quartz India

With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young peoples minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across Indias biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.

From physical banking to providing contactless solutions such as digital wallets, the Indian financial services sector has undergone a sea change in recent times. The policy framework, too, has evolved to accommodate more payments banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), and small finance banks. The government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now fulfills more digital payments in India than cards and net banking. With growth in digital banking, roles that involve mitigating risk, managing cyber security, and ensuring privacy will gain prominence. Many banks have already started appointing chief risk officers.

Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of credit card payment app CRED, told Quartz:

The most critical need for talent is not in one specific role, but traits that apply across functions. The people who can make an outsized difference bring a combination of what is conventionally known as left-brained and right-brained thinking. They understand human behavior and motivations, empathize with users, and imagine products and experiences that address challenges from the ground up. The same people also reason effectively, create logical workflows, and execute at scale. This combination of creativity and reason is the single most differentiated attribute for talent, and one by which we evaluate every individual. Using CRED is delightful because of this empathetic approach to design that our team members conceive of and deliver, from the head of design who is a full-time musician to a colleague who is a poet.

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Kunal Shah on the jobs that will define India's future - Quartz India

Human Behavior

Former Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer: Consider the Human Element in Decision Making – Yale School of Management

When Richard V. Spencer assumed the role of 76th secretary of the United States Navy in August 2017, he says, the ill effects of 16 years of optimizationstreamlining operations as resources shrankwere evidenced by both lives lost and a morale account that was overdrawn. During a talk at the Yale School of Management on February 6, Spencer likened his efforts to effect institutional change to that of a corporate turnaround. After 16 years of war and deploying our troops probably much faster on a rotational cycle than we should havethe fundamentals of the United States Navy had worn away and eroded, said Spencer. Wed been running the machine at 100%, low on oil, with bad fuel.

The technical solutions to the problem would include more and better training for surface warfare officers (SWOs)officers who serve on Navy shipsbut addressing the human side of the equation was equally important to ameliorating the situation, he said.

Spencer, who was fired from his position in November 2019 after clashing with President Donald Trump over the court martial of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, spoke as part of the Becton Fellowship program. The lecture series was established at the Yale School of Management in 1980 by Becton, Dickinson & Co., a leading global medical instruments supplier, in honor of Henry P. Becton 37 B.S., company chairman (1961-1987), to bring practitioners from private and public institutions to share their professional insights with faculty and students. The conversation was moderated by Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies and Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management.

In his talk, titled Optimization, Decision Making, and Ethics, Spencer said that the lessons he learned and the tools he honed as secretary of the Navyespecially those related to crisis and risk management and ethical leadershipcan be applied readily in the private sector. One such lesson came from Spencers efforts to restore the esteem of the Navy, both internally and externally, after years of management that prioritized optimization. After leading comprehensive and strategic readiness reviews to determine pain points within the institution, Spencer realized the problems were deeper and broader than first anticipatedand that they would require not only technical solutions, but also behavioral interventions.

One of the things we found in the reviews was that there was a lagging of pride in the SWO community, said Spencer. As simple as this sounds, we gave surface warfare officers a leather jacketand a log book to record how many dockings they do [to inculcate a sense of pride]. That was an meaningful step forward on a human basis.

Spencer urged the Yale SOM students in the audience, As you become managers, know that every single lever should be used. The obvious information will come out in the data and in strategy, but dont forget the human behavior elementits a huge lever.

Spencer also advised students to develop and adhere to a true north, which will serve them well in times of crisis. He credited his Christian upbringing teaching right and wrong, years of education, and a commitment to honing a personal ethics with helping him handle the Gallagher affair.

When it came time to make the decision [to not proceed as the president wished], it was the easiest decision Ive had to make, he said.

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Former Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer: Consider the Human Element in Decision Making - Yale School of Management

Human Behavior

Explore the boundaries of the human element with Bitdefender at RSA 2020 – Security Boulevard

One year back, Bitdefender was featured in Dark Readings series Cybersecurity and the Human Element: Were All Fallible. At that time, we provided our perspective on the fallibility for end users, security leaders, security analysts, IT security administrators, programmers, and attackers. Fast forward to today, RSAC 2020 Trend Report singles out the human element as the main trend in cybersecurity in 2020, and themes RSAC 2020 event around it:

Of the nearly 2,400 submissions, we saw human element embraced across sectors and silos, with challenges and successes of human behavior intertwined within discussions of data, threats, risk, privacy, management and teams.

But the topic is not recent.

15 years back, Kevin Mitnick, arguably the most notorious hacker in history, now turned white-hat and businessman, wrote that people, not technology, are the weakest link in security. In his bestselling The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security; (2005), he proved social engineering can lead to large-scale breaches even without advanced hacking tools.

Unsurprisingly, phishing is the leading attack vector as employees are tricked into opening attachments or clicking links by increasingly well-designed fraud emails that even the trained eye sometimes fails to spot.

As a result, security consultants, advisors and analysts continue to single out security awareness training as one of the most critical actions any company can take to prevent breaches. Can industry vendors step in for an organization when security trainings fail? Yes, and Bitdefender is relentlessly working to fill that gap with its end-to-end breach avoidance approach.

The desire to rapidly expand and adopt new technologies is a ticking security bomb that often chafes on internal teams.

The top security concern across organizations is the excess of tools and complexity that often leaves cracks in the wall that hackers can squeeze through. IT has a hard time managing different agents and separate security management platforms. And since the IT department normally has to handle more than just security, admins find themselves overwhelmed with tasks and often fail to respond quickly when an unsuspecting user has clicked on the wrong link.

The risk is often exacerbated by the expansion of the attack surface caused by rapid IoT adoption and the never-ceasing migration to cloud. Often, neither IoTs nor cloud are secured immediately after the organization adopts them.

Bitdefender has embarked on a journey to protect and help employees, the most fragile security pillar in an organization, by bringing together hardening and risk analytics, prevention, detection and response under the same roof, as part of its end-to-end breach avoidance strategy. Our goal is to help IT departments spend less time on security, and to intervene when IT has limited reaction time.

A mix of over 30 prevention machine learning algorithms automatically stop more than 99% of attacks across the infrastructure, offloading monitoring and response from the admin.

A single solution covers end-user devices, servers, cloud workloads, network and even secure IoTs. Multiple awards from endpoint, network and cloud capabilities prove this concept to be not only comprehensive, but also effective across the board.

What we call our end-to-end breach avoidance strategy is an answer in many cases when the human element in an organization fails.

During RSAC 2020, Bitdefender is also pre-announcing its own security operations center, a reaction to the severe talent shortage in the market.

CISOs struggle with ever-more urgency to identify security candidates, match high salary expectations and train them to internal procedures, only to see security experts leave every few months. Bitdefender is looking to relieve customers of this burden by offering both tools and expertise in its very own 24/7 SOC. Instead of struggling to find and keep security experts, our customers can simply rely on Bitdefenders forensics experts to monitor and respond 24/7 to every security incident in their organization. This much-needed outsourcing of security leaves more room for the business to grow.

In 2020, RSAC explores the boundaries of the human element in cybersecurity, such as the pitfalls of toxic working environments, or the potential impacts when cybersecurity and engineering experts fail to leave their egos at the door.

Bitdefender is joining the fight by relentlessly pushing the boundaries of cybersecurity platforms to step during the inevitable stumbles of the human element.

Join us for the perfect mix of hourly security power sessions brought to you by our specialists and wind down with the entertaining show of the extraordinary magician Ken Newman.

Do you believe that fortune favors the bold? Then be sure to join us after each session you can win a Fitbit Inspire Fitness Tracker.

Be creative! Follow @Bitdefender_ENT, take a picture with a magic trick at our booth and tweet it using the hashtag #BitdefenderRSAC!

We will be randomly choosing two winners daily towards the end of Business Hall hours to win a Security Box containing:

Cam cover for laptops

Mini cover for tablet and mobile phones

Anti-Hack Jack to block data transfer

Audio blocker to prevent hackers from listening in

Do not wait and sign up for a meeting with our Bitdefender security specialists. You will have the opportunity to ask all the questions that stand in the way of you getting the best protection in the world.

Note: Bitdefender is the first security platform in the industry to unify prevention, detection, response, hardening and risk analytics across endpoint, network and cloud. With GravityZone, Bitdefenders end-to-end breach avoidance platform, IT can employ a single agent, single console across the infrastructure, and effectively contain breaches with no management overhead. Its a single security strategy for the entire device spectrum, physical, virtual and cloud, regardless of OS, hypervisor or cloud platform. Even IoT risk is contained with agentless security via network traffic analytics.

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Explore the boundaries of the human element with Bitdefender at RSA 2020 - Security Boulevard

Human Behavior

How To Researchers say this is the key to becoming a better decision maker – Ladders

Effective leadership has everything to do with organization; the ability to eliminate sterile agents from a larger vision.

When attempting to realize ambitious ideas, were often stifled by the tendency to get overly granular. Ostensibly, giving yourself as many alternatives as possible seems practical, butnew research actually suggests that limiting yourself to two options is the most effective way to execute tough decisions.

One goal of our research is to understand how people act in a world with ever more options, as you have with online stores or large shopping malls, explained study leader Professor Sebastian Gluth in apress release. Usually, we dont have to choose between an apple and an orange but between tens or hundreds of different apples and oranges.

The study, published in the journal of Nature Human Behavior,posits that there are rarely more than two viable options facing us on any given task. The sooner we weed out tertiary options, the sooner we can decide between the two most appealing contenders.

When it comes to leading a team, judgment doesnt mean much if it isnt attended by momentum.

The new paper was co-authored by a team of neuroscientists from Basel University.

Computationally, the researchers demonstrated how quickly our attention spans become compromised in the presence of too many considerations.

We show that extending an established sequential sampling decision-making model by a value-based attention mechanism offers a comprehensive account of the interplay between value, attention, response times and decisions, the authors wrote in the report.

Via two preregistered tracking experiments and a series of rounds assigned to each, 139 participants were asked to choose between three different food options. By analyzing the subjects eye movements the researchers were able to determine that the respondents were not spreading their attention evenly across the three choices presented to them. Instead, individuals devoted the majority of their focus toward the two most appealing options.

When the third and least appealing option was eliminated from the start, participants were able to decide between the two contenders much quicker. They were additionally more likely to second guess themselves when faced with more than two variants. This particular flaw in the decision-making process has actually been documented in preceding literature.

The effect, since dubbed divisive normalization, describes panic energized by distractors masking as courses of action. Among students and even academicians, relative choice accuracy between two options decreases as the value of a third option increases.

You might recall being instructed on the process of elimination at some point during your education. Its a logical approach to an abundance of possibilities. The sheer presence of multiple alternatives fogs our judgment. Intrinsically we know which courses of action actually deserve our consideration, which is why eliminating as many improbable candidates as possible strengthens our decision making instincts.

An executive needs to be able to survey all of the factors that will adversely and advantageously affect an outcome, prioritize the latter and foresee consequences of the former. Not merely for the sake of profit but also to be able to explain their process to their subordinates.

Leaders must be able to analyze, interpret and evaluate vital information as presented in charts, graphs, text or tables. They must understand what the numbers mean and how this impacts their options,writes Director of Content Management at Insight Assessment. Being a strongly skilled decision-maker requires having excellent analytical and interpretive skills. These are used to determine the issues that must be addressed and accounted for in the deliberative and implementation phases.

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How To Researchers say this is the key to becoming a better decision maker - Ladders

Human Behavior

Mindfulness and Attorney Well-Being in the Legal Industry – The National Law Review

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Attorney wellness and a focus on all aspects of employee well-being, including mental health, has become an important issue in todays workplace environment. Law firms, and the legal industry in general, with its competitive reputation, expectation of heavy workloads and high stakes environment is beginning to embrace wellness practices as an anecdote to the chronic stress often faced by attorneys and other individuals who work in law firms.

The problem is so widespread that in 2017, the ABA House of Delegates approvedResolution 106 amended the ABA Model Rule for Minimum Continuing Legal Education (CLE) to include a requirement for lawyers to receive at least one hour of mental health, substance abuse credit every three years. And mental and physical health issues as well as substance abuse CLE courses are mandatory in several states, such as Illinois and Florida or count towards professional responsibility credits in numerous other states.

Elena Rand JD, MSW and Chief Marketing Officer of Wiggin and Dana has been working on this issue for years, putting her experience as a litigator and a legal executive coach along with her Masters degree in Clinical Social Work to help those in the legal industry understand chronic stress, how it impacts the body, and how mindfulness, even at a basic level, can help improve performance and well-being.

Elena Rand and Eilene Spear of the National Law Review will be hosting a panel at the Momentum Events Employee Wellness Event for Legal and Professional Services Providers at the Riverside Hotel in Fort Lauderdale on February 27- 28, and in preparation for that presentation they sat down and discussed some aspects of mindfulness, identified some barriers to its practice and outlined the need in the legal industry.

Attorney wellness and wellness and the legal community in general is something that has been sort of a mission and a passion of mine probably for the last 15, maybe even 20 years. It really came to the forefront of my attention when I was working as a legal executive coach. I was doing coaching for a large law firm, really focused on working with attorneys to improve their leadership and business development and networking skills and taking high-performers to the next level. What I invariably discovered is that there is an underbelly of crisis and struggling for many of these enormously successful, high achieving, high performing go-getting attorneys. I found that attorneys were struggling both in terms of managing their baseline day to day life to extreme mental health issues and addiction. That kind of came to full bloom and grabbed my attention.

As a legal executive coach working with high-performing attorneys, I was sort of a first responder in many ways for a lot of the wellness and mental health crises that were being buried for many, many years. Before we could even get to how to focus on getting you to the partnership level, and how do we focus on doubling your book of business, attorneys were coming to me on their own saying, I don't think I can take another moment of this, or if I add one more thing to my day, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to really lose it.

I started to see that this was an issue that kept popping up and presenting itself, so I went back to grad school and earned a master's in clinical social work. I wanted to have a real behavioral toolbox so that I could understand human behavior, understand the spectrum of wellness and the lack of wellness, and really be able to service the legal community in that way.

Additionally, wellness has been a lifelong personal struggle and mission, in my life. I was one of those crazy, high-performing litigators who hit a wall at 90 miles an hour when I had my first child at the age of 27 and suffered from crippling postpartum depression. Suddenly, after years of just pushing and pushing, I one day woke up to realize that I was now severely impaired. It was very scary and humbling and you know, it became sort of my own passion and mission to really bring a level of attention and awareness to wellness in the legal community.

That question's really important. You know, stress is basically a physiological reaction to a perceived threat to you and to your environment, right? So that's where you get the whole fight or flight physical response. That's what stress is. From a biological perspective, what ends up happening is your blood pressure goes up, your veins constrict, and you have basic physiological symptoms kicking you into fight or flight mode. From purely a biological perspective, these automatic stress responses can have serious ramifications that can end up impairing an individuals daily functioning.

Biology impacts our behavior; so chronic, ongoing stress in the body manifest and present some clearly identifiable behavioral dysfunctions. For starters, chronic stress induces a level of constant baseline agitation. Everything and anything can be irritating to the point of explosion. Everyone is a little bit of a powder keg about to explode. Chronic stress will cause sleep deprivation. It has been linked to eating disorders. It can cause imbalances in your metabolism. It'll cause imbalances in your serotonin level, and the other thing it does is it causes isolation. You have increased isolation with stress because you're protecting yourself. You're not talking to anybody, you're going through all of these things and everything in your body and mind is telling you to isolate.

From an executive functioning point of view, there is so much research to show that people functioning under high levels of stress for a long period of time can demonstrate impaired judgment, impaired ability for conflict resolution, and impaired compassion. These impairments impact interpersonal relationships at work including client relationships. High stress has a whole host of impairments associated with high-level executive functioning that really is being called into play moment to moment. As an attorney, chronic stress can compromise your ability to focus and use good judgment. Your ability to analyze situations correctly and be able to step away and say, is this a moment for confrontation? or is this a moment for cool off? is now off. Your ability to assess how best to present information appropriately to the client, to the associate, or to the partner is also off. Bottom line is that chronic high stress really impairs many of the operational skills needed to interface and practice effectively as a lawyer. Finally, it also impairs the softer skills that are really needed as you become more of a senior partner and involved in business development.

From a business perspective, both individuals and the institutional law firms are negatively impacted by untreated chronic high stress as an individuals capacity to handle situations and use good judgment and analysis have basically gone out the window.

Basically, mindfulness is bringing your attention to the present moment in an intentional, deliberate and systematic kind of way with an attitude of acceptance of whatever might show up or for whatever you're experiencing. What mindfulness does, is it forces you to pause, which is, you know, a novel concept for many attorneys. One of the key things that happen when you are in a stress-induced situation is you stop breathing. We hold our breath. When you do that, you essentially jack up all of those sympathetic stress indicators in your body I mentioned before.I really want to make mindfulness super clear and basic, because I want to make mindfulness practice really accessible and strip away any preconceived ideas of what mindfulness is.

So, what is the power of the present moment? If we strip it down, the present moment for any human being at any given moment is made up of a cocktail of their emotions, their sensations, and/or their thoughts. When you're bringing your attention to that bundle of things that are happening, what you're feeling, what you're thinking and what you're sensing in the world, suddenly you start to breathe and you start to invoke and sort of trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the self-calming, self-soothing embodiment that we all automatically have in our body. What you're inviting yourself to do is to intentionally focus on the present moment so that you can breathe, so that your body can be able to kick itself into a place of calmness.

Were not talking about achieving nirvana, you know, we're talking about creating a tool that is user-friendly so that in the moment you can pause, breathe and be able to ground in the present moment so that your body and your mind can kick into a betterand perhaps, more optimal way of functioning.

Thats a simplified way of thinking about it because other levels can be a little off-putting or intimidating. If you read a lot of philosophy on mindfulness and meditation, anyone who claims they're an expert in mindfulness doesn't get it, in my opinion. We're all beginners. And the idea that we are all beginning all the time in this process with the beginner's mind is what can make the difference of whether you try mindfulness or not. There is no perfection or achievement award in mindfulness; starting at the beginning and paying attention to the present moment over and over again is the practice.

Many thanks to Ms. Rand for her insights. Tomorrow we will have Part 2, which will address the basics of what mindfulness practice can be, as well as some barriers to practicing mindfulness and how to overcome them.

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Mindfulness and Attorney Well-Being in the Legal Industry - The National Law Review

Human Behavior

These Are The World’s Best Universities And Colleges For A Psychology Degree – CEOWORLD magazine

Psychology is a wide term that encloses the study of various elements; emotions, overall development, behavior, personality, thoughts, motivation are just to name a few. Its fascinating to know about these aspects of human beings, as it helps in a better understanding of themselves as well as others. The world features astonishing universities for deep study of psychology. We have listed colleges and universities where you can enroll for the worlds top psychology courses.

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These Are The World's Best Universities And Colleges For A Psychology Degree - CEOWORLD magazine