Keep Your Garbage Inside: A Security Briefing for the Soul
by Ryan Cloutier, CISSP | Scarebear Industries
In cybersecurity, we teach a fundamental principle: contain the threat before it spreads. When systems get noisy—leaking logs, spewing alerts, dumping unfiltered outputs into public view—we don't call it transparency. We call it a breach.
The same holds true in human systems.
Lately, we’ve normalized a kind of emotional DDoS attack on one another. Unprocessed feelings get dumped in real time—on social media, in meetings, in relationships. It's as if the firewall between thought and expression has been disabled.
And so I offer this—less as a moral critique, more as a systems advisory:
Keep your garbage inside. Not forever. But long enough to run diagnostics.
Garbage = Raw Signal
Let’s be clear: garbage isn’t shameful. In security, garbage is signal with no context. A noisy packet stream. A malformed request. It might mean something. It might be noise. But you don’t broadcast it across the network until you’ve parsed it, traced it, understood the source.
Your emotional garbage? Same principle. Before venting that email, rage-posting that thought, or throwing blame into a shared channel, ask yourself:
Am I processing this, or am I infecting others with it?
Containment Is Integrity
Real integrity isn’t about pretending you’re fine. It’s about not weaponizing your own pain. It’s about not offloading internal risk onto the public cloud of human interaction.
Containment is love. Containment is security. And yes—containment is maturity.
When you keep your garbage inside, you’re saying:
“I respect the uptime of this relationship.”
“I won’t inject malicious code into our conversation just because I had a bad compile.”
“I value signal over noise.”
Compost, Don’t Dump
In the cybersecurity world, we log everything—but we don’t share raw logs with the public. We analyze, correlate, and contextualize. That’s what makes a SOC (Security Operations Center) work.
Your mind needs a personal SOC.
When something toxic arises—fear, shame, anger—you log it. You study it. You process it. You refine it into something useful.
Garbage isn’t the end of the story. Garbage is the raw input for growth. But only if you do the work.
Unprocessed? It’s just pollution.
Processed? It’s compost.
The Emotional Zero Day
We’re living through an era of emotional zero-days. Unpatched vulnerabilities in our communication. People are publicly exfiltrating their inner pain because no one taught them to sit with discomfort.
It’s time we changed that.
The future of security isn’t just digital—it’s emotional, ethical, and deeply human.
Operational Trust Begins With Internal Hygiene
Before you secure others, secure yourself. Before you speak it, sort it. Before you post it, patch it.
Keep your garbage inside—not in shame, but in respect. For yourself. For your team. For the people walking through a world already overloaded with false alerts.
Contain it. Sort it. Compost it.
Then, if you must share—do it like a seasoned vCISO:
Quiet, clear, useful, and only when it improves the system.
📧 Ryan@scarebearindustries.com
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⚔️ Leading with love, securing with truth.