23 April 2008

Interactive theatre a success at Infosecurity Europe

Steve Gold , reporting from Infosecurity Europe 2008

The interactive theatre - where the audience gets to participate by
voting in the seminar - was hailed a success at this year's
Infosecurity Europe show, which ran until Thursday of this week
at the London Olympia centre.

In an interactive event held on Tuesday, hosted by Symantec and with
presenters that included Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of BT
Counterpane, the audience got a chance to vote in a staged version of
what can happen in a a major corporate when a security incident
occurs.

Introduced by Guy Bunker, Symantec's chief scientist, the panel went
through the process of discovering a rogue access point in a
fictitious company's staff training room, adding extra information
including a recent IT staff departure and a lost laptop, for the
audience's consumption.

The good news is that the seven voting sessions, in which the audience
was asked to guess what the correct option for the `company managers'
to take in a given situation, proved the audience was on the ball in
taking the correct decisions.

Bruce Schneier's advice to the `company' - and the audience - was
succinct when a suspected rogue wireless access point was discovered.

He said that the firm needed to learn from its discoveries, and
consider installing a secure wireless network alongside a limited-
facility `open' network for guest usage.

"The core network in an organisation always needs to be protected," he
told the audience, adding that creating a parallel open wireless
network is the best option, since it caters for guest access, and
avoids compromising the secure system.

Schneier went on to say that he views drive-by farming - the process
of people tapping into open wireless network access points - as no
longer being a major threat for companies, since open APs can be be
locked down to provide very limited access to Internet facilities,
such as email and general Web surfing.

There is a risk, he said, if the open AP users go on to surf to
inappropriate Web pages, but - generally speaking - he said he was in
favour of creating a guest network as a form of protection for the
parallel secure wireless network.

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