Are we heading to a day of reckoning, where the forces of cyber crime overwhelm and erase the good things that information technology delivers? If we head down our current path of incremental, individualized approaches to cyber security, the answer is “Yes.” But I’m enough of an optimist to think that if the IT and security geeks and wonks of the world can unite, share information, work hard, and not worry about who gets the credit, we stand a fighting chance. Read More »
RSA 2013 ends and I both miss it and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over. Let me explain. As a security guy, it’s nice to be around other security like-minded people. We all speak the language. You needn’t really justify why you are worried about things most people have never heard of. It’s exciting to see so many people try so many different things, be it startups, big companies, or inspired individuals. It’s great to see government employees, corporate executives, and pony-tailed security geeks all talking to one another. In a slightly strange way, it’s therapeutic.
That said, RSA is an incredibly intense week, and this year’s conference was no exception. In four-and-a-half full days (and this is just my schedule), I had:
Eight customer meetings
Eight dinners (working out to 1.78 dinners per day.)
Four press interviews: two on-record, one background, 1 live videocast via Google+
Four bizdev/company review meetings
Two panels
Two analyst interviews
Two partner meetings
One customer breakfast talk along with with Chris Young
And this doesn’t include the countless run-ins with friends, a quick word here or there, and emails that all have to be managed along the way. In some respects, you don’t get enough time with really good friends (if there really is such a thing as enough time for such people in our lives), and in the end, it’s a huge blur from meeting to meeting.
I posed a question in my blog earlier this year: Are we making progress in cyber security? I say yes, yet not nearly enough, and now I am thinking hard about how to change it before RSA 2014.
The RSA Conference is expected to be bigger and better than ever this year—more booths, more vendors, more technical sessions and keynotes.
But I have to ask the question: “Are we as IT practitioners better off now than we were 4 or 5 years ago?” There are a lot of people at the show who worry that the old approaches aren’t working and next generation solutions have not clearly come into focus. I do think, however, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic.
Join me for a live broadcast from the RSA show floor on Wednesday, February 27 at 10:30 AM PT as I discuss what I’m seeing at the RSA conference and what it means for the IT Security industry. We’ll be taking your questions live via Twitter and Google Hangouts. Read More »
A month from now, thousands of cyber security friends, colleagues, professionals, hackers, defenders, sellers, buyers, old timers, and newbies will descend on San Francisco for the 2013 RSA Conference. We will challenge one another about what has changed, create new topics and new words to describe the previously indefinable, scare the heck out of each another, and ask the same questions…often: “What’s changed in the last year? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it new?”
“Security in Knowledge” is an apt theme for this year’s RSA. It resonates with me, given my very strong opinions that no company can effectively manage cyber security alone, either people-wise or data- and information-wise. Can any organization analyze 13 billion web requests per day? 150 million endpoints? A daily deluge of 75 terabytes of incoming data? You can’t cope with that yourself. We need to move to crowd-sourcing security, creating security knowledge, and ultimately increasing effectiveness rather than watching the ship continue to take on water at intermittently slowed rates. Read More »
As security practitioners, we generally see three types of perpetrators with different motives:
Financial
Political
General trouble-making
Each of these attackers can display various levels of organizational structure:
Individual
Well-organized, persistent group
Ad-hoc groups pursuing a common purpose
Each one of these subsets has their own techniques and goals, but unfortunately, can strike anywhere at anytime.
As different attack types come in and out of vogue, we are closely watching all of these perpetrators and their preferred methods of attack to better understand how to recognize and counteract them.
In the video linked here, I discuss some of the latest threat trends, and how businesses and individuals can prepare and protect themselves.
