Security to take center stage at MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

Security executives from several large enterprises will take part in a panel discussion on how technology trends such as cloud computing and social networking are affecting security, and opportunities for sharing security information, at the 8th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium to be held at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., May 18.

The panel, “New Trends in Cyber Security and Privacy Protection,” will provide “a forum to discuss operational strategies and technologies that foster business continuity and resilience over global supply chains,” says Owen McCusker, principal analyst at consulting firm Sonalysts Inc. and moderator of the panel.

“We will highlight the impact of social networking to risk exposure and the importance of proactive response strategies,” McCusker says. The group will also look at the use of shared private clouds and the emergence of working groups focused on the sharing of threat intelligence used to proactively mitigate threats.

“Our discussion will focus around a realistic notion of complex threat agents that use simple attack strategies to persist in our organizations, mining our intellectual property and manipulating our data,” McCusker says.

“In the last few years, we have seen a significant increase in the volume and sophistication of cyber attacks against both governments and private corporations,” adds Michael Daly, director of IT security services and deputy CISO at Raytheon Co., and a scheduled panelist. “These attacks impact two major categories: defense and critical infrastructure providers; and financial and personal information collectors.”

Governments and large corporations within critical infrastructures are beginning to respond to the threats by developing new strategies, such as growing forensic capabilities, expanding incident handling, and sharing threat information with those who might have been their traditional competitors, Daly says.

Another panelist, Allen Allison, CSO at Navisite, says part of the panel discussion will cover the changing security and compliance needs in government and business, “including how the two work together to implement the evolving controls.”