The RSA show last week induced some rather interesting observations – not all having to do with security.
Security experts say the darnest things: RSA Conference 2009 brings out the unexpected.
Last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco was as intriguing as past years. In fact we’ve found that security experts can say the darndest things. Here are a few choice memories from the RSA Conference 2009:
* Enrique Salem, Symantec’s new president and CEO since April 4 following John Thompson’s retirement. Who is this dude? Well, in an interview he told me when it comes to music, he likes classic rock, grunge and in particular Don Henley. But he’s so fond of his 12-year-old daughter, he’s willing to endure a Britney Spears concert on her behalf. He’s an avid cycling and skiing nut, hitting the winter slopes at Park City, Utah. Formerly Symantec’s chief operating officer and in much earlier days a software engineer, Salem says his first hours as leader of the multi-billion security, storage and systems management giant, with consumer and enterprise lines of business, have been an interesting shift. That’s because he’s noticed his top assistants “don’t want things to come to me” from people inside the organization pressing for his attention. They’re worried he’ll be subsumed by endless detail. So he says he’s quickly learning “you want to delegate the decision-making” while maintaining “a level of accountability in an organization.”
* Lt. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and chief of the central security service. The NSA has this reputation as the shadowy but giant agency of the U.S. government involved in high-tech surveillance, so Gen. Alexander’s appearance for a keynote at RSA was a bit like the Wizard of Oz stepping out from behind the curtain. He made it clear he’s just a regular guy who finds it “wonderful” to be “digitally connected.” But he reminded us we might want to be concerned about terrorists, the Chinese military and the type of “cyber-riots” that hit Estonia, but from where? He was too tactful to say. And oh yes, he acknowledged that at the NSA “we make mistakes, And when we do we self-report.” By the way, they’re hiring…Speaking of the NSA, Dickie George, the agency’s technical director in the information assurance evaluations group, was on a panel at RSA discussing interoperability and he opined about the NSA experience: “You can’t have special users with special needs. Getting people to understand they’re not all that special is hard.”
* Keith Mularski, FBI special agent. It is special when you are involved in an FBI sting operation, as Mularski was last year in infiltrating undercover an online carding forum selling stolen payment-card information spanning several countries. Mularski described how the success of the so-called “Dark Market” operation take-down can be attributed to international cooperation with law-enforcement abroad, including Turkey and Germany. And the amazing part: The undercover Mularski had convinced the crime bosses online he was just another cyber-crook. Then he managed to get the entire crime operation to migrate from their server, which was having problems, over to his—which gave the FBI a clear look into entire operation. Mularski’s remarks about the cyber-crook mindset: “They always want instant gratification. If you’re not online all the time, they think you’ve been arrested.”
* Robert Lentz, Dept. of Defense (DoD) assistant secretary for information assurance. Seemingly easy-going for someone with responsibilities for 1.1 billion Internet users, 7.7 million computers worldwide and more than 15,000 separate network, Lentz is the equivalent of the chief information security officer for the DoD. In a session at RSA, he pointed out that the DoD is now so dependent on networking that “airplanes cannot fly if the network is down.” He said he worries about the “insider threat”and also noted “the reality is the bad guys are going to be in our network” and the military needs to figure out how to fight through that.
* For the most mind-boggling RSA session, the award has to go to U.S. Dept. of Justice attorneys Howard Cox and Kimberley Peretti in the DoJ’s cybercrime division. They gave a stunning description of the multi-million-dollar rip-offs going on today in the banking industry’s Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) by sophisticated criminal groups who exploit weaknesses in payment-processing networks to empty out ATMs. No wonder Melissa Hathaway, the Obama Administration’s acting director for cyberspace, made a reference in her keynote at RSA to criminals who “steal hundreds of millions of dollars” and ‘in a single 30-minute period, 130 ATMs were illicitly emptied of their cash.” It’s happening.”
