The Ins and Outs of Infosecurity

What’s hot--and cold--from the Infosecurity New York conference.

By Paul Kerstein

December 13, 2005 — CSO —

By Sarah D. Scalet

Couldn’t make it to Infosecurity New York this year? Here’s the Cliffs Notes version of what people were (and weren’t) discussing at this year’s annual conference, which took place December 7 and 8.

IN: Intrusion “prevention” systems
OUT: Intrusion detection. Because wouldn’t you rather prevent the intrusion in the first place?

IN: Bots (remotely controlled worms). Armies of them. (See How to Tell If You Have Bots.)
OUT: Website defacements. One speaker called the idea “quaint.”

IN: “Designer worms,” made just for your company and likely to end up on your balance sheet.
OUT: Massive worms, targeted at everyone and likely to end up on CNN.

IN: “Google hacking” parties, to see if your company has inadvertently made any secrets accessible with the search engine.
OUT: Using Google just for text searches. How pass?/P>

IN: Quarantining laptops that don’t have auto-updates enabled, for both patches and anti-virus.
OUT: Trusting users to do this themselves.

IN: Hacking for profit. Speakers noted that identity theft is becoming a bigger business for organized crime than illicit drug trade.
OUT: Hacking for attention. Criminals would rather that you not notice what they’re doing. “Low and slow” is the goal.

IN: Concerns about instant messaging—from new worms that chat to compliance issues.
OUT: Concerns about Wi-Fi. Is it under control, or just forgotten? Who knows.

IN: Motivating users. One speaker noted that if you publish a weekly list of the top 10 sites visited by your employees, you can bet that Playboy won’t be No. 1 on the list more than once.
OUT: Educating users. It doesn’t work.

Read more about data protection in CSOonline's Data Protection section.

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