Back in the day, when I thought that I was going to change the world from behind a keyboard, I wrote a password manager application.
It was a small, portable application that ran in both Windows and Linux, without needing to be installed. The idea was that you could keep your passwords with you on a USB stick and have access to them wherever you were.
The application also had the option to generate strong passwords for your online accounts and used 128 bit AES encryption to protect the whole thing.
The application was called LazLock and was marketed as a user friendly alternative to larger applications like KeePass, or less secure options like keeping your passwords in the cloud.
LazLock began to be used by a lot of people and was reviewed in Linux Format magazine in their 2018 round-up of open source password managers. I got a real kick out of having a print magazine doing an article on something I'd written, but then I experienced the flip-side of having written software that people actually used... the users.
I began to receive feature requests and tech support questions from people all over the world who were using LazLock.
I tried to answer them as quickly as I could, I still remember being stuck in a post office queue in Wrocław and guiding an elderly gentleman via email in how to backup his data.
I actually began to resent the amount of emails and DM's that I was receiving, it became a massive time-sink to respond to them all.
But just before I turned into a total Cyber-Scrooge, something happened.
I was contacted by another coder who asked if he could translate the software into Portuguese, his native language. After some back and forth, he took on the duties of running the translation team and LazLock is now available in 17 languages at the last count.
The elderly gentleman who I provided support for in a post office queue made a cash donation to the project and paid for the web hosting.
People have since forked the project, now it's grown beyond me and become its own thing. I couldn't be happier about that.
The community that has grown up around it has improved it more than I ever could on my own.
Too often in security, and cyber security in particular, we view people as the biggest point of failure. A vulnerability rather than a strength.
Without people though, security is a solution without a problem. It's all about the people
