People are the Biggest Unknown for Security Leaders
April 24 2008 | 1 comment(s)
Your correspondents spent the day yesterday at InfoSec Europe in London. We were looking for innovators and talking to the big integrators and corporates. One of the most interesting parts was a panel we sat in on. It was hosted by Microsoft and moderated by Paul Fisher from the SC Magazine. The panel consisted of security leaders from Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Gap Gemini, who debated threats we are facing in IT-Security.
(Un)surprisingly they spent the majority of time talking about PEOPLE, not technology as the main threat that organizations are facing in regards to IT-security. While this might sound astonishing at first, Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor, Ed Gibson, gives a logical explanation. He explained that security has been traditionally located within a company's IT-department. Ed recons that a false sense of security exists when a company does not take into consideration the people-element. Technologists are comfortable controlling security on a network- and application level, but the human and social elements are just not part of their expertise. This isn't to say that the danger lies from spies within as an equally dangerous proposition comes from people who unwittingly or unintentionally give away the company's secrets.
The panelists also conceded that web 2.0 is still largely an unknown and that its potential changes to people's social behavior arguably pose larger risks than the pure technology impacts. The danger here is how do we plan security for something that is not understood?
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Comments
April 28 2008 11:53AM by The GSC Team
There is an interesting follow-on article at http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/25/a-diplomatic-blackberry-flap/?mod=WSJBlog
Evidently Rafael Quintero Curiel, a communications staffer for a Mexican delegation that was in New Orleans to meet with President Bush, allegedly stole six or seven BlackBerrys belonging to White House officials, according to Fox News. Sounds to your correspondent that Rafael gets that it's not about the blackberries but what is on the blackberries -- the world's second oldest profession is still very much alive.
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