Cybersecurity News

Next week Cybersecurity News will be coming to you live from the 2011 RSA Conference inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

In advance of the week-long event, RSA today held a press teleconference to discuss the security industry, trends and what to expect from the keynote speakers, panelists, exhibitors and other industry experts coming together in the Bay Area next week.

Joining RSA on the call, Rob Ayoub, industry manger of the North America Information and Communication Technologies Practice at Frost & Sullivan, laid out the lines on what he expects to be the hot topics of this year’s conference.  His predications:  Cloud, mobile security and privacy.

Backing his list of buzz words, Ayoub suggested that recent Facebook privacy issues, data loss and leakage, including that published on WikiLeaks, as well as the roll out of new technology and mobile devices, have all contributed to the rise of security concerns over the past year, thus shaping the agenda for next week’s conference.

Also on the topic of current events shaping cybersecurity, Josh Corman, research director of the 451 Group, addressed the latest hype on Stuxnet, cyber warfare and hacktivism on the web.

“It’s kind of drowning the industry and sub-optimizing the economic outcome for everybody,” Corman said, regarding security news that he deemed as “scare tactics” made against the industry. “The practitioners are sick and tired of fear tactics, and it’s almost been a parasympathetic overshoot to the fact that we’re so numb to FUD [i.e. ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’], that these really scary true developments are dismissed as just another fear tactic.  It’s like the boy who cried wolf.”

Also commenting on new cyber fear, Rich Mogull, founder and CEO of Securosis, addressed the press call with a look at cloud computing and the security issues surrounding the model.

Stating that new technologies are “disruptive environments,” Mogull asserted, “The cloud is so disruptive in terms of how it’s affecting all areas that it’s having a real big impact on security and how enterprises manage their data centers today.”

Noting that “not everything in the cloud is insecure,” Mogull went on to list Amazon.com as a corporation that has successfully used the model.

Following up on Mogull’s claims, Corman noted that cloud is “a fairly difficult conversation” because it’s “not sufficiently detailed enough to have meaningful conversation.” Regardless, all three panelists on the call agreed that we’ll have our fair share of what Corman called “cloud-watching” at this year’s conference.

In addition to Ayoub, Corman and Mogull taking the stage next week, RSA Conference keynote speakers include: President Bill Clinton; William Lynn III, US Deputy Secretary of Defense; General Keith Alexander, Commander of the US Cyber Command; James Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow at the CSIS; Enrique Salem, President & CEO of Symantec Corporation; Scott Charney, Corporate Vice President of Trustworthy Computing for Microsoft Corporation; and George Kurtz, Worldwide Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at McAfee.

To see what else is going down next week, check out the RSA Conference agenda.   And if you have a question you want Cybersecurity News to hunt down an answer to at the event, send an email to CybersecurityNews[at]gmail[dot]com.