We were supposed to be traveling to spend Christmas with family today.
🚨 However, when I was woken by a heat loss alarm at 3am, and found the -35 wind chills were causing the combustion intake for the furnace to freeze over about every hour, I knew we weren't going anywhere.
🥶 So, until the sun came up, I was bundling up, going out, and clearing the port, about every 45 minutes.
🧐 The problem is that the exhaust and intake were installed too close together, and the prevailing wind is blowing the warm, humid exhaust right in front of the intake. When the intake grabs that air and sucks it back in, it's forming little crystals and slowly closing the hole, until the furnace shuts down.
🕵️♂️ Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but in this extreme cold, the system under stress exposed a flaw in the design. In the short term, until I can install a concentric vent system, I grabbed a few pieces of PVC and created a little space from the exhaust.
Seems like a bad situation, but look on the bright side:
✅ Caught it before we left and damage was done (can you imagine coming home to a Home Alone "Wet Bandits" style basement due to burst pipes?!)
✅ Found a reasonable workaround.
✅ Learned something new about applied thermodynamics in extremely cold temps.
✅ Had the skills to be able to quickly diagnose and fix the issue (my father worked in HVAC and passed on a lot of good knowledge to us over the years).
🙏 A lot of things to be thankful for!
💡💡💡
Working on this, I was immediately reminded of the LastPass breach.
💡💡💡
▶️ Many of us had our holiday turned upside down with this news, and many of us are scrambling to make sure our organizations are protected in light of the news.
▶️ I see a lot of negativity floating around about this, and I don't want to minimize the fact that it's not an ideal situation, but:
✅ IMHO, LastPass provided good transparency of the issue, and we have the time to make a good plan and execute on it because of that.
✅ We have options. It's definitely going to be painful to change a bunch of passwords, especially for really large deployments (see climbing a ladder in -40° every 45 minutes) but it's doable. Can also choose to migrate to another provider if we want.
✅ We have the skills to fix this. Honestly if you're in a spot where you were already getting good adoption on a password manager, you have a head start on the migration, since your users are accustomed to the flow of the app. It's honestly easier than a net new implementation.
✅ We've identified a way to get better and we can take those lessons learned and get better on the next rep.
⭐ Also, we have time. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. we need to move with purpose, but not so fast we fall off the proverbial ladder as we seek to fix the issue.
🙏 A lot of things to be thankful for! Set the right tone for your teams as you work through this!
#LastPass #breach #riskmanagement #informationsecurity #cybersecurity #leadership
