RSA Conference 2012

This weekend the 2012 RSA Conference begins! I am looking forward to a busy week. Every day is essentially booked from 7am to midnight. I hope to see many of my friends at what has become an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco each spring to catch up on information security trends and technology.

For me, the focus will be on security metrics and risk management, because I've got a talk (Monday morning) and a panel (Wednesday morning), and a half-day seminar (Thursday afternoon) on these topics. It seems the big security issues for 2012 are: Cloud, Mobile, Social Media and Big Data.

I am on another CISO panel at noon Thursday, talking about these security trends. I have been thinking about Big Data for a while now. I find it a fascinating subject - maybe because of my science research background (in a previous life). From the consumer perspective, embedded systems and networked systems are all around us. Data is being collected on your spending habits, Google collects data and with social media, your life is increasingly in the public domain. Now, our cars, tractors and toasters are going to be networked nodes, sending data where you drive, what you plant and how dark you like your bagels back to corporations who will horde it and manipulate it and aggregate it. Security data is coming from standard network devices in the enterprise: the firewalls, routers, IDS... and it is merging with information gathered from badge readers and other "physical security" sources to build up a model of what is "normal" for you... a new biometric, "What You Do". All together, we are looking at mountains of data, and these data sets need to be pared down, while manintaining their integrity, manipulated and analyzed in an ethical and confidential way. This is cool stuff, Maynard!

See you in San Francisco!

RSA Conference 2009

I was just reading this article (LINK) about the 2009 RSA Conference, held in San Francisco last week. I haven't spoken to my friends, who organize the the conference yet (OFFICIAL SITE), but it seems that numbers were somewhat down as expected this week, due to the economy.

I spent the last week here, in Moline, at my desk. As it turns out, I have a huge number of projects going on that need me here, and so our new travel policy (not to travel) made sense to me. I was happy to stay here, keep working (and keep my job!) But, I must say, I was a bit nostalgic, since this would have been my 10th conference. I think having missed this year, 2010 will be even better. I can only hope that the economy improves and that this great venue for information security doesn't dry up and fade away! We probably can't ever have things the way they were five or ten years ago, but for many of us, this is the one chance we get to meet up with all of our friends, catch up and review what's new in the security industry.

November Ending

Well, the month of November has whizzed by! This last week I've been preoccupied on an emergency migration off our legacy server (in a friend's sock drawer in Virginia) to Hostgator.com. It was fairly smooth, once I got all the files transferred. Out of the couple GB of data, there were about 60,000 files it appears. It took a few days of checking and editing to find and fix all the broken links due to the case-sensitivity of Linux. Now that it's done, I feel that these twenty sites are a lot faster and I can rest assured that the site will always be accessible and live. (** The nTelos DSL option was cost effective for the past decade, but week long outages, and recovering from hard drive crashes has been just too time consuming, so it is very nice to now have business-class hosting/email services for $12.95/month!)

Now that the websites are running, I realize I haven't blogged in a while, so I will try to catch up on writing along with scanning in photos from 1992-2006 photo albums. I am currently trying to get a "Tour of Santa Fe" posted, and I will work through the various "travelogue" sets from ppsa.com, and my favorite photo sets (Outer Banks trip, RSA Conferences, etc.) Getting all my pictures uploaded and ordered will take time, but it will be very nice to have hi-resolution, edited and tagged photos online. It is pretty easy to keep up with new (digital) photos, but editing old, fuzz-covered photos from my younger, wilder days can be VERY time consuming. If you visit my Flickr, you will see quite a diverse range of pictures. Eventually I will back-date them to the correct chronological order and maybe create another account just to showcase my favorites.

On the security front, I have confirmation from Google for the RSA Conference panel, but I am waiting to hear back from another vendor. I should contact him today!

My IEEE meetings went well this month. We had a turn out of over 120 for the Joe Nickell presentation on November 8th. It was a great outreach to the community on critical thinking. We had a computer society meeting with the student branch on November 20th, and had about 25 people attend the talk on Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks. We just need two more signatures before our local Computer Society chapter is officially recognized! We have an upcoming holiday event in a couple weeks, which should be fun, but we have to decide exactly WHAT it will be in the next day. I might make it to Chicago one or two times in December for holiday events with the ISSA and CSO Dinner group I belong to.

Time to get back to work! I'll try to add to this security blog more frequently!

Security Goals for 2009

I was caught off-guard today by the announcement that the RSA Conference submission deadline is coming up in a week! I need to decide if I will submit any of the successful (interesting? timely?) projects I have worked on in the past year for consideration. I would love to present at the April 2009 conference in San Francisco. I was sick this past year, and kind of bounced around dosed up on Nyquil all week!

Besides this great conference, I was involved in the Black Hat 2008 conference in Las Vegas this past summer. It was good to serve on a panel for the executive briefings. So, if I can't get a paper submitted (my employer isn't always keen on discussing projects publicly), maybe I will be able to serve on a committee or panel. I was on the RSA Conference organizing committee this past year, and it was a great experience.

I finish my year as chariman of the IA-IL IEEE Section in January, and become past-chair. I still remain active in the Quad Cities Engineering and Science Council, and I am working on bringing in a speaker for the local Putnam Museum in November. I am also working on starting a "Computer Society" chapter for IEEE locally. If all works out, I will have a meeting in November at St. Ambrose University to kick that off!

For the coming year, I am serving as treasurer for the FBI Infragard board (Springfield Chapter). I am also the education chair for the IEEE for Region 4 (midwest). I think these things will keep me pretty busy. I have enjoyed my involvement with IEEE the past several years, as a board member, and it was great to spend a week in Quebec City in September for our Sections Congress. In addition to computer security, it is a great opportunity to promote general science and engineering, and critical thinking skills with K-12 and all members of the local community.

That's my update. I will try to use this space as my "professional" blog, and keep it updated with events I am participating in, and my commentary on topics related to computer security.