'Outlaws and terrorists' amplify security challenges, Motorola security chief says

Security pros need to respond quickly to changes to help companies survive, Bill Boni said at Infosec.

ORLANDO -- The current era is marked by tumultuous change, high speed and huge danger, said Motorola's corporate security officer Bill Boni, based on his perspective of more than 30 years as a security practitioner.

"Outlaws and terrorists are now positioned to compete -- and sometimes win -- against nation states," said Boni in his presentation Monday at the Infosec conference. Criminals are coming together to "leverage the Internet," sometimes more effectively than the good guys do, he said. Add in the global economic crisis, and Boni said the current era is the most dangerous he can recall.

"I've never seen the world this unstable and dangerous," said Boni, who recently was put in charge of Motorola's physical security as well as information security. From terrorist attacks such as the devastating attack on a hotel in Mumbai to infiltration of payment card networks, as occurred at Heartland Payment Systems, it's clear "there's unprecedented risk to organizations and people," Boni noted.

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ORLANDO -- The current era is marked by tumultuous change, high speed and huge danger, said Motorola's corporate security officer Bill Boni, based on his perspective of more than 30 years as a security practitioner.

"Outlaws and terrorists are now positioned to compete -- and sometimes win -- against nation states," said Boni in his presentation Monday at the Infosec conference. Criminals are coming together to "leverage the Internet," sometimes more effectively than the good guys do, he said. Add in the global economic crisis, and Boni said the current era is the most dangerous he can recall.

"I've never seen the world this unstable and dangerous," said Boni, who recently was put in charge of Motorola's physical security as well as information security. From terrorist attacks such as the devastating attack on a hotel in Mumbai to infiltration of payment card networks, as occurred at Heartland Payment Systems, it's clear "there's unprecedented risk to organizations and people," Boni noted.

For security professionals trying to protect corporate assets, there is a need to respond quickly to changes to help companies survive in these trying times, he pointed out. "Speed is the mega-trend facing the organization," Boni said.

Even though security professionals have worked to install measures such as intrusion-prevention or antivirus defenses, and sometimes restricted Internet use, their role needs to evolve into more of a facilitator to help corporations conduct business in difficult times.

Boni said he sees this at Motorola, which operates in 64 countries. He recently hired a "change-management professional," a former audit director with formal training in the field, to help change Motorola's risk culture.

"Security is a service function, not a product or tools," Boni said. "We provide an experience."

It's no longer possible to base ideas about change on multi-year plans, he added. Security teams have to be there on the spot with ideas when business plans are made "ad hoc, unstructured and spontaneous," he said.

Business employees and their partners are working in an electronic world with fewer perimeters than before, but ubiquitous means of communications and portable storage. Decisions have to be made much more quickly than in the past, Boni said.  "The terms 'insider threat' and 'outsider threat' are almost meaningless," he added.

At the same time, he warned attendees that the global economic crisis is likely to usher in more regulation. "There is the likelihood of a huge increase in regulations because of the global meltdown," he concluded.

These appear to be trends for today and into the near future, he said. Some analyst projections for the year 2015 seem even more dire, predicting a world where there will be scarce natural resources for a large world population even as information technology becomes ubiquitous, Boni added.

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