John N. Stewart

When we talk about using the network to gather threat intelligence on a global basis, the question arises: how does someone apply that intelligence to protecting their local IT infrastructure? The key lies in maintaining a high degree of situational awareness. This begins with understanding what you…

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a new name and a new mission for the group I lead at Cisco. I’ll do my best to minimize reader exposure to boring administrative details, but the long and the short of it is that the former Cisco Global Government Solutions Group (GGSG) has become the Cisco Threat…

Are we heading to a day of reckoning, where the forces of cyber crime overwhelm and erase the good things that information technology delivers? If we head down our current path of incremental, individualized approaches to cyber security, the answer is “Yes.” But I’m enough of an optimist to think th…

When I think about IT security, I don’t immediately start thinking about threats, hackers and countermeasures, but begin with what is happening to IT in general. Right now, the three big megatrends in IT can be summed up in three words: virtualization, collaboration, and mobility. Unfortunately, it’…

RSA 2013 ends and I both miss it and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over. Let me explain. As a security guy, it’s nice to be around other security like-minded people.  We all speak the language. You needn’t really justify why you are worried about things most people have never heard of. It’s exc…

We’ve invested considerable time, effort, and money in the effort to make Cisco products robust enough for deployment as Trustworthy Systems, either in their own right or integrated into a complete solution. At its essence, attaining trustworthiness is a matter of discipline—a series of conscious ac…

The RSA Conference is expected to be bigger and better than ever this year—more booths, more vendors, more technical sessions and keynotes. But I have to ask the question: “Are we as IT practitioners better off now than we were 4 or 5 years ago?” There are a lot of people at the show who worry that…

“Think globally, act locally” is a phrase, now cliché, because it expresses an incontrovertible and immediately graspable truth. The global-local concept applies when it comes to mobilizing globally-collected cyber threat data, which in turn informs local IT operations against hackers and crim…

A month from now, thousands of cyber security friends, colleagues, professionals, hackers, defenders, sellers, buyers, old timers, and newbies will descend on San Francisco for the 2013 RSA Conference. We will challenge one another about what has changed, create new topics and new words to describe…