Hope you had a great time in Crypto Commons yesterday evening and had the chance to catch up with your colleagues and peers over drinks. It was great to see the buzz and energy on the show floor. Before I start recapping today's events, here’s a cool highlight – attendees from 69 countries around the world checked into RSAC!
As the 9am sessions started this morning some members of the RSA Conference Europe Program Committee had an interactive and lively roundtable discussion with members of the press talking about Information Sharing and Privacy, two hot topics this year. We’ve seen many sessions at RSA Conference Europe gravitating towards privacy and the topic of data sovereignty. Panelists Hugh Thompson, RSA Conference Program Chair; Greg Day, FireEye; John Colley, ISC2 EMEA; and Toby Stevens from the Enterprise Privacy Group discussed the long term impacts and the implications for enterprises and government agencies. On Information Sharing, there were a lot of questions around how public and private organizations can collaborate effectively and in real-time as information sharing is becoming so critical. The keywords from this session were definitely transparency, sharing and trust.
Those delegates looking for more knowledge to move beyond a policy-driven security model into a data-driven approach were at the right place this morning for the first keynote of the day: “Data-Driven Security – Where’s the Data?” delivered by Wolfgang Kandek, Chief Technology Officer, Qualys.
Mark Hughes, Chief Executive Officer at BT Security followed on stage and gave a fascinating report filled with amazing stats on how BT delivered a seamless and secure network infrastructure during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games revealing what it took to safeguard the network from attack. Some of the stats included:
- At least one hacktivism campaign each day
- 2.31 billion counterpane events analysed = 77 incident tickets
- BT prevented 11,000 malicious requests per second
- 212 million malicious connection attempts blocked
Joshua Corman, Director of Security Intelligence, Akamai Technologies covered the emerging role of DevOps (development + operations) in security. He discussed his beliefs that DevOps is a game-changer and may be the end of security as we know it. And to close today's keynotes, Hugh Thompson, Programme Committee Chair, RSA Conference, delivered a session on the “Degrees of Freedom: Rethinking Security” which demonstrated what security professionals can learn from mathematics to define security variables that matter most.
One of the most popular track sessions this afternoon was Breach-Aholic Anonymous – What Can We Learn From Data Breaches? This session covered lessons learned from a variety of data breaches given there is no universal European Union law mandating firms within the EU to alert regulators when they’ve suffered a breach. Panelists included: Dwayne Melancon, Tripwire; Brian Honan, BH Consulting; Javvad Malik, 451 Research; and Quentyn Taylor, Canon Europe
News from our sponsors today:
Media Coverage:
- Infosecurity Magazine: RSA Europe 2013: The Lessons BT Learnt from Securing London 2012
- Cupfighter blog: #RSAC: Hacking Back as a Law Enforcement
- IT Pro Portal: RSA Europe 2013: Live coverage from Amsterdam
- The Register: 'Thousands of iPhone, iPad apps' vulnerable to simple redirect joyriders
- V3: Windows XP six times less secure than Windows 8, warns Microsoft
- V3: Symantec to create cross-industry big data cloud hub to fight targeted attacks
- Computer Weekly: Analysis: RSA says security needs to change, but what does that mean?
- IT Web: Eliminating security solution islands
And don’t forget to follow the conversation on Twitter - #RSAC, and follow us on LinkedIn, facebook and YouTube.
Hope you enjoyed the 2nd day of the Conference and we’ll see you all tomorrow!
Linda