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Brianne Fahey

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Space to Work

March 16, 2018 by Brianne

There are a lot of influences on an event.  Each of us have our own set of internal and external forces working on us as well.

My goal is to be able to draw from my headspace or my heartspace.

You know those days when your senses tingle to lead you to your lost keys and there’s no actual logic or reason to your discovery?  That’s your heartspace. Your intuition, instinct, and natural internal abilities drive from the heart.  You can close your eyes and lead from your heartspace with nothing but an idea and some imagination.

At other times nothing but numbers drive what you do next. You work smart with the tools you have at hand. You follow a procedure and endeavor to produce predictable results. You make a plan based on the likeliest outcome and use a tried and true technique to get there.  Some days you don’t want to chase a guess so you follow a trusted formula and lead with your headspace.

Both of these methods are good methods.  Finding a blend is even better.

I’m really in The Zone when I can work from both my headspace and heartspace. If I can build a plan based on the research, pay attention to the fails and the changes and then pivot into a new idea or a variation on the primary, I can persevere.  Work with your peers and mentors,  dig in to your headspace and your heartspace.  Make questions and find answers and keep trying – be it forward, backward, or sideways – till you get your conclusive point.

 

I put together the above image with my free trial of MindJet Mind Manager 2018.  I consider this a Venn diagram of the things that live within my own headspace and heartspace.

Find a Zone that works for you and build up your material understanding and experiential inclinations to grow it and support it.

Filed Under: Featured, Knowledge Tagged With: connections, curiosity, diagram, learn, mindjet, mindmap, plan, visualize

Weak Connections

January 20, 2018 by Brianne

Maybe the source of the problem is not where there is the most noise…

I’ve got an idea percolating but I’m not sure how to model it yet. Apologies up front for not being super-specific, if I can reason out enough pieces of this idea I will hopefully harness it for a paper I’m planning to write later this year.

Some types of attacks have so much human behavior in them that there is no system rule you can put in place to detect.  I was watching some videos from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and I stopped on Kathy Lavinder’s “Power of Weak Connections” on YouTube. She says that it is not always your strong, personal connections in your professional network that help you get news jobs – it is the weak connections with people who know you just enough to help move a resume or an inquiry into the right hands.

There is energy and opportunity in the kinetic connections between two sources. But what if the crux of the opportunity is in the weak connection rather than the strong connection? Does this idea carry into the cyber attacks and fraud detection?

Visualize

I’d like to analyze that data, and see the strengths of the connections.  Does the hypothesis of the weak connection providing a strong vector hold up under the math?  I’m reading about UML and graph databases to look for a way to re-categorize some existing data in order to redraw and reexamine the connections.  It seems soft to compare a fraud or cyber attack to a business process modeling method, although I am certain I will learn something and I’m looking forward to applying some old techniques in a slightly different way.

 

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: connections, fraud, hypothesis, visualize, youtube

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Research

Whitepaper in the SANS Reading Room:
Defending with Graphs: Create a Graph Data Map to Visualize Pivot Paths

© 2025 · P. Brianne Fahey, Cyber Threat Analyst