The Bobby Bones Show - Secure The Bits

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Spencer Lanning lost his job during COVID, and is one of many people who were forced to face their demons in the isolation of the pandemic. Coming out the other side, he now protects Vermonters from hackers in his job as a cyber security analyst.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's call it a great transformation, a change in the way workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever, putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves as they find their life's work. COVID forced a lot of people to face their demons in a way they might not have expected. The loss of work took away daily purpose for many and left a lot of us trying to fill that void with whatever we could. Well, today we talked to Spencer, who lost his job when COVID hit and found new work in cybersecurity, a rapidly growing field.

that's desperately needed as hackers get better and better at what they do. And it's a job that gave him the opportunity to help others, as he dealt with addiction struggles that many people faced in the isolation of the pandemic. After many remote interviews to make this season, I had the fortune of meeting up with a friend of mine in person for this episode. My name's Spencer Lannning. I am an information security analyst for the state of Vermont. Spencer's 52 years old.

We got a clean shaven head, glasses, a mustache, a dress shirt, and the background in chemistry. Is that kind of why you've got a Walter White look going on? Yes, I do math on the side. That's what this is really about. I'm trying to sell it on the state level. We'll never know for sure. Security analyst is a pretty good front.

Well, in that job, working for the state, Spencer's primary job is risk assessment. So we have to look at everything that we do because we do use personal identifiable information, such as people's social security number, their names, their addresses, all of that kind of stuff. If you do your job poorly, what happens? Well, if I do my job poorly,

then we have the possibility of having a security leak that can harm potentially tens of thousands of people. So he spends every day working to improve that security. So Vermonters don't have to work. worry about their information being stolen. And he says that at his core, that's all IT workers and cybersecurity people want to do. They want to help. And they want to make your life easier, better, and safer.

Or to protect you from yourself. Because there's an awful lot you don't think about when you do things. And it's my job to think about all the things you possibly could do that could make your life really bad. Really bad. Yeah, really bad. Really bad, because when a hacker has your information, they can sell it. And that can really mess with your life. You can get your identity stolen.

You can have your credit cards maxed out. You've heard all the stories. Spencer makes sure that the people who work for the state are being safe online and not opening sketchy emails. Because if they got compromised, hackers could have a back door to the state databases. There are safeguards in there in between, but it is a, you know, it's how this sort of thing happens. That is, 90% of the attacks happen through email. And all it is just you click a link and poof, there it is. Vermont's a small state. So they might not see as much action as other

states as far as fending off hackers goes. However, the threat is constant and a breach has pretty dire consequences. So the only real things that people would probably glean from it is the ability for them to actually go through the state government to infect federal government. By law, state governments are required by the IRS and other federal agencies to have a certain level of security, a number they have to hit to pass regulation. As he's in risk management, Spencer and his team use software that assigns risk numbers to everything, like the software employees are using, the equipment they're using, lots of other factors. So we add all of those things up and give the agency basically a number that says this is what your risk is. Now, the IRS wants

this number. So how are we going to get from this very large number to this very small number? How are we going to mitigate this risk? Did you always want to do something like this? Not security. I'd always, I've always been a nerd from the time I was a little small and fell in love with computers and science. Those were the two, those are the two things, math science and computers. were my strengths. Spencer grew up in West Texas, real small town near Lubbock. It was very rural. There wasn't a lot to do.

So Spencer got lost in other worlds as early as five when he got his first library card. Which the library didn't normally do that, but I would go and check out five books and then read them all in a day or two at most. And then go back another five books. When he was in sixth grade, his school brought a couple of the first Apple II computers into their library. And the librarian told Spencer to check them out. So I went in there and played with them and I was like, this is actually really cool. And then started checking out books and starting to learn how to program and, you know, I can do this. I can do this. And so it was just

a natural love for things. Like you went out of your way as a kid to learn how to do all that like original rudimentary coding for the old computers? Yes. I did. I spent my lunch periods in in the library on those computers. You must have stood out. Yeah, like a sore nerd thumb. Spencer was definitely different. He didn't fit into the normal crowd the way some other kids might. So the books, the coding, they were a refuge.

Yeah, it was definitely escape. I didn't have a happy childhood, perhaps. We'll say that anyway. And so that wasn't, it was sort of an escape. And it was something that I could control. You know, you can control everything that a computer does. And I liked that. That was one of those moments of, oh, I can own that.

He loved coding. Loved it. Loved it so much that by the time he was about to go to college, he knew that he couldn't go into computer programming. Because I can remember in high school when I was programming, I would lose days. totally just trying to find the two or three bugs that were in there. I missed a semicolon here and I missed a, you know, spacing here. And I would just dive into the code and just I would lose absolute track of time.

Coding was a refuge for him, but it was also an obsession. Why is this not working? Why is this not working? Why is this not working? And trying to find that one little mistake somewhere that was causing a whole thing to not work. And you're the kind of person you had to know. I had to know, yeah. I couldn't just let it go. It was a mistake. He decided, instead of going down that road, he'd get a degree in chemistry, one of his other passions.

He did that, got an internship at Dow Chemical while in college, but he didn't love it. He left school for a bit, not thinking it was right for him, but then he got pulled right back in by his love for computers. Eventually wound up with a technical writing degree, actually, with a minor in computer science. You know, it made me a happy person. He got a job at a nonprofit within the university as a computer analyst. Then he jumped from there to New York City to work at the World Federalist Movement, another nonprofit. He was coming up with IT plans, helping them acquire their software, help them with development, anything computer-related. I became basically a system admin for them.

So you were the IT guy that like if there was anything wrong in the company in the building, they're like, call Spencer. Yes, because there was only me. I was the IT. That was a 18-year job. During that time, Spencer and his wife, Ava, had a daughter. Ava got offered a job in Vermont, which they loved every time they drove through it, so they decided to move there. And Spencer kept his job at the nonprofit.

I was like, I can still do my job no matter where, as long as I have an internet connection. And so I did. I did that for quite some time. Right up until 2020, Spencer was doing this remote work. But then, of course, in March, COVID happened. The non-provity worked for was pretty much held up by big grants, which went away pretty quick,

and the staff started dropping off one by one. I was able to hang on for a little while. And then in May, the majority of the funding went away. And so it dwindled down and dwindled down and dwindled down. And finally, IT became not a necessary component, but something that they just couldn't afford. Like many people in early 2020, Spencer was very suddenly out of his stable job. And also, like a lot of people around that time, was facing isolation that would become a reckoning for him.

And so it wasn't in the best mental state. And things kind of went downhill for me after I lost my job. We'll be right back with Spencer's story after the break. A strong work ethic. pride in a job well done, sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response, you need a callback, you need a job. Express employment professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get a job.

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Get to No Express. Find your location at Expresspros.com or on the Express Jobs app. Back to Spencer. It's 2020. He just got put out of work. and like a lot of people, he's having a hard time with the isolation. And begin to have a bit of an alcohol problem, and things kind of went downhill for me.

Spencer admits that he was a habitual drinker before COVID. But a few years into the pandemic now, I feel like looking back, when the world really closed down, people had to face their habits in close quarters, and there was a real fork in the road. Where some people got shaken up, And they're like, you know, I'm going to start doing yoga and I'm going to get my dream job. And like basically using the isolation to, I don't know, clean themselves up or whatever.

And then there was the other direction where the isolation was just a place where you can go and self-destruct. It definitely, I did not go into the happy, let's go do yoga and let's clean our lives up. Let's, yeah, no, the isolation really tore at me. and gave me an opportunity to drink more. That was the thing that really kind of seemed in it. It became such a daily obsession. Such a daily obsession. Spencer doesn't blame COVID for his drinking,

but says it definitely didn't help. He says he always knew there were demons that he hadn't faced yet. But I was able to shove that. down onto a floorboard way way down deep into the dark crevices of my mind and did that for a really long time and was I guess successful at it but it eventually catches up because eventually you do fill up the entire basement and it starts overflowing a lot of the things that he was shoving under the floorboards were from his rough childhood he had a lot of trauma that he hadn't dealt with so in this new isolation where a lot of it was coming back up, he drank more to Beria. And that

overflowing basement isn't really a metaphor for Spencer. The deciding factor for me was when my wife took me down into the basement and showed me all of the empties. And I went, oh, wow. It was one of those clarity moments. I had tried to stop and couldn't, and so I had to go get help. and I found a group who helped me out of like-minded people who gave me the strength and the ability to dig myself out of the hole that I was in and give me hope for the future. Spencer is far from alone. Between the isolation and losing the purpose that comes with waking up every day for a job, addiction rates and substance abuse drastically rose all over the world. I can attest to this because I was one of those people.

I'd always had demons too that I smothered with alcohol. But COVID gave me a place to self-destruct in a way that I never really had. Took me to the lowest moments of my life. And I know this is weird to say, but I'm grateful it did because I got desperate enough to get better, just like Spencer. That was a good moment in my life and a bad moment in my life. It's kind of a, it's sort of a bittersweet moment. But I'm so glad that it happened because I'm in such a much better place than I've ever been before in my life. Same buddy.

So, he decided to make some changes. First, he had to get out of this isolation. He needed something to do every day. So for a job, I actually became the head brewer for a local brewery while I was trying to get sober. He admits not the most beneficial place to be. at the moment, but it was a job. It got him working. He left that after a few months when an IT job nearby came up, and then there was another one. There was a job that came up when it was like asking for an information security analyst,

and I was like, I don't know anything about it, but I'll apply for it, but the heck. This was the job with the state that he has now. He never done cybersecurity before, but he still had that attitude from when he was young, where if he didn't know something, he was a dog after a bone, and he had to figure it out. And that helps in the security industry. Because you do need to find those bugs. You need to find those holes. You need to find what we need to patch and what we need to do.

After two interviews, I got the job. And here I am, you know, nine months later. Back to present day, he loves his job. He works every day to make sure Vermonters personal information is safe. And if he's doing his job well, people probably never hear about it. No, in IT you typically don't hear when things work. You hear when they don't work. So, and that's just the nature of the beast.

But he says he still gets a ton of satisfaction out of it. It can be thankless and might be work that most people don't realize exists until it goes away. Spencer's also a volunteer firefighter on the side now, and same deal. Unless your house is on fire, you're not going to necessarily think a firefighter. But when your house is on fire, that's the first person that you're going to turn to. For better or worse, as technology becomes vastly more integrated with our personal lives day by day, that means there are just going to be more bad actors out there, looking to take our information and sell it. There's always going to be somebody who's looking to make a buck off somebody else and the easiest way possible.

And not everybody realizes that. It's up to me and to other people to say, you've got to think about this, or make sure that you're sure you're doing this so that you don't expose yourself and any information that you might have. Spencer says that even a decade ago, anti-virus software and hiring a cybersecurity person for your business was a good idea, something you probably should do. But now, with how online all of our lives are, it's not even a question. These are things that you have to think about and you have to think about where is my information? If I put my credit card number in on a website, is that safe? If somebody asked me for my social security number, is that safe to give them? Is my health

information safe? So, you know, security and people's personal information has become the forefront of what computer science now has to battle. And with that being the case, there are tons and tons of jobs in cybersecurity right now, everywhere, for big companies or corporations, or corporations, startups, or if your main drive is just helping people. There's tons of work with nonprofits and state organizations where the pay, admittedly, might be less. A job can be more than that. A quality of life is important in working for the state of Vermont.

It's about quality of life and has nothing to do with a job. It just has to do with making you a better human being, a better person. A job is not necessarily about the paycheck. part of what drew me to working for nonprofits was that satisfaction of knowing that when I went to sleep at night I knew I had done something for something more than myself. It's kind of funny that when you first start up coding

and diving into literature and computers and stuff kind of the point of that was that it was isolation and now you do it but you do it for a lot of people. It is something that I do think about. And it helps me come to terms with that I'm giving back somewhere. And giving back is an important part for my sobriety. It's also an important part as a human being. If we all gave back more, things would go a lot smoother.

Do you feel now like you're recoding yourself? Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah. You know, I'm fixing some of those bugs that were there. Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely fixing some of those bugs. and, you know, things are running a lot smoother than they ever have been before. COVID brought a lot of people to their knees, myself included.

It put people out of work. It's put people in really tough living situations. It's put people in a room with everything that they are. It's made some of us come to terms with who we are in a much shorter time frame than we might have liked. But as we come out of this storm, with new values, new morals, new ways of living and new habits, we've had the fortune of having had the time to think about how we can help ourselves. And it turns out, as a lot of people go back to work,

they've realized that the best way to do that is by helping other people, even if they only call you when something's wrong. What are the next bugs you've got to fix for yourself? Oh, there's always something to fit. But, yeah, learning to be more patient, learning to be more kind, and to know, to know that,

There is hope. There is hope always. There's always hope and there's always a chance out there. Makes life worth living. It's not always, it's not always a bowl of cherries, but it doesn't have to always be the pits. Yeah, you saw what I did there. We're 100% ending on that. For on the job, I'm Otis Gray.

Thanks for listening. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, help is out there. You can go to findtreatment.gov or call their national hotline [phone]-help for more information. That's 1-800-662-4357. We'll put this info in the description of the show. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill, expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're simply safe. They have completely changed the game.

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It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and out, side and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, Simplysafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's best customer service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash bones.

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