At my high school reunion, we talked about what we all do for work these days.

Gail ran a restaurant when she left school but is now a health inspector for the Vermont Department of Health.

Steve is a night watchman for a group of warehouses in New Jersey.

Lynn became a bridge inspector.

Karl spent most of his career as a pilot and now performs plane inspections for a major airline.

April works in a hospital lab, looking for disease in blood samples.

Allen works for the USDA as a food inspector, performing regular checks at food production facilities.

Me? I’m a network threat hunter. Sometimes, that takes a while to explain (*cough* every holiday *cough*), but to these six friends, it made sense.

We each spend our time actively and regularly looking for threats of one kind or another. We have scheduled inspections, we look for signs of trouble, and, when we find one, hand them off to someone who can investigate further to fix the issue. The goal is to find issues early, before they become real problems.

If we just waited for an alert to go off, it might already be too late to fix.

If you go for regular checkups with your doctor or have your car inspected every year, you’re a threat hunter too!

— Bill Stearns