News

EBay Aims to Help Security Officers through Red Team Confab

By Dave Gradijan

February 28, 2008 — CSO — EBay is trying to help chief information security officers (CISOs) build a common front in the war against cybercrime.

The company played host to chief security officers and a handful of technology vendors this week, holding its annual Red Team security conference at the company’s San Jose campus, billing it as a networking opportunity for security professionals where they could discuss areas of common concern.

"What we were trying to do was to get all the CISO’s together," said eBay CISO Dave Cullinane. "We’re dealing with similar problems, almost all of us."

While companies using Internet technology may be facing a common set of problems these days, they haven’t always shared information with their peers. That’s because if news of a hacked server or a data breach is leaked to the press, it can become a public-relations disaster for the company involved.

EBay Red Team This has helped keep many cybercrime victims quiet, even when dealing with law enforcement. Cullinane, who came to eBay in late 2006 after working in the banking industry, wants to change that.

That’s why he kicked off Red Team a year ago, inspired by the BITS forum, an information sharing confab hosted for the financial services industry.

Although BITS has been around for more than 10 years, there wasn’t a comparable event for technology companies like eBay before Red Team started, Cullinane said. "I think the IT piece was so specialized that everybody had the idea that, ’My company is unique,’" he said.

It turns out that this isn’t necessarily the case.

At this week’s conference, CISOs discussed common issues like how they are pursuing cross-border investigations and what they think of the security products they were using.

The second-ever Red Team conference ran Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference focused on CISO issues, while on day two, the discussion was opened up to security vendors such as iSight Partners and Cisco, which gave presentations on the state of security.

While there are a lot of security conferences, Red Team is unusual because it is hosted by a company facing many of the same challenges as CISOs, said Robert Rodriguez, a security consultant who attended this year’s conference.

That’s important because a venue like Red Team gives executives a way to get to know and trust each other, he said. "CISOs are talking more about sharing data than ever before," Rodriguez said.

Microsoft hosts a similar security conference, called Blue Hat, but that event is designed to