No, I am not recanting my stance on the Jericho Forum, that loose collection of IT pros that have the hairbrained idea that the days of the firewall are numbered. They call it de-perimeterization. I call it nuts.
I am talking about fences around airports. This afternoon some crazy guy scaled the fences at Heathrow wearing a backpack. He was tackled by police and the backpack was blown up.
I have been making an informal survey of airport fences in recent weeks. I have visited airports in LA, Detroit, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. I can faithfully report that none of these airports have adequate physical barriers to entry. Any intruder who is minimally athletic could bypass the typical wire fence topped by barbed wire that these airports have. There are many segments near gates buildings and poles that do not even have barbed wire. One can only hope that their second line of defense (cameras plus security guards) are better than their first line.
Kudos to the police at Heathrow for demonstrating the importance of a layered defense!
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Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst. He is currently consulting, speaking and writing on all manner of security topics for IT-Harvest, the IT research firm he founded to cover the security space. He was most recently chief marketing officer for Fortinet. He has served stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner, and Webroot Software.
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