Just a few short days after RSA, we hit Infosec Europe 2009. A little better facility in Earl’s Court than last year’s Olympia (and the roof doesn’t leak).
Similarly to RSA, there didn’t seem to be one dominant topic threading through the conference, but a few that sparked some conversation. Future attacks was right up there, along with securing the cloud.
For starters, we saw that fear is alive and well overseas as former UK home secretary David Blunkett warned of massive cyber attacks on an unprecedented scale at the 2012 London Olympics. He certainly got things going, saying people defending disparate systems could be outsmarted by a coordinated attack on those systems, due to the distribution and number of different technologies that need to be defended.
Specifically he warned of hacks on ticketing systems, the transport system, hotel bookings and communications that could result in "chaos." Could this be a case of actually inviting hackers to the table by referencing all the different systems they could potentially penetrate? On the other hand, it’s probably just another day in the office for attackers.
Security pundit Bruce Schneier got some face time at Infosec, saying that, among a few things, security is headed to a services model – essentially outsourced. This dovetails into the cloud discussion where a lack of standards around cloud computing means a lack of standards around securing the cloud. But he warned that this shift toward the cloud was inevitable for organizations globally because of the massive cost savings that cloud computing offers.
Sophos was toting their survey that found that a quarter of companies have fallen victim to spam, phishing or malware attacks via these sites. They were also stating that individuals are responsible for TMI (too much information) being shared on social networking sites. That’s all well and good, but to be honest, other than rumors and tiny bytes of data, I don’t think any attacker is looking at information on Facebook and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I can sell this.”
No sightings of the Queen, Amy Winehouse, or Gordon Ramsay unfortunately. But all in all, a decent forum for security vendors.
