Day 2 of FOSE Wraps Up
By Kellep Charles, SecurityOrb.com
The second day of FOSE started with a keynote address by Senator George J. Mitchell, former U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under the Obama Administration. He discussed how advances in technology have changed the environment of conflict resolution.
The Senator’s keynote followed two interesting and important topics within the “Insider Threat” issue. The first panel, “Insider Threat – The New Presidential Directive” consisted of moderator Gordon Snow from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Deanna Caputo of MITRE and John Swift at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
They discussed how industry has changed since an Army staffer leaked thousands of diplomatic cables to Wikileaks and how it lead to President Obama issuing an executive order aimed at better securing data stored by government agencies, as well as the initiative that every agency will consist of an Insider Threat Program Management Office (PMO).
In conjunction, a technical approach to detecting insider threat was also being discussed by another panel that consisted of Dawn Cappelli of Carnegie Mellon and Jay Boggs of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Ms. Cappelli stated, “Most people steal the information they are working on.” Meaning programmers steal their code, scientists steal their research and business managers steal their business plan. In addition, employees take most data within 30 days of presenting a resignation letter to their employer. Using that information can help security officers investigate with the use of logs and other tools to determine if any violations occurred.
The panel also discussed, many traditional security controls are not the answer to detect insider threat. Knowing your people and extensive data mining is how you will find the needle is a BIG haystack.
On the exhibition floor, I also spoke to a number of vendors in the mobile device space. It seems some vendors are using mobile devices to enhance security (such as Thycotic for password management), while others are creating tools targeted in collecting key information from mobile devices (such as in Logicube’s cellxtract, designed specifically for forensic investigation of mobile devices). Then you have baiMobile which offers two interesting solutions in the mobile space, one pertaining to a smart card (CAC) reader that works with mobile devices and the other pertaining to a secure Bluetooth device that enforces all of the necessary settings to impede
eavesdropping and other security risks when using a Bluetooth headset.
In all, the vendors were extremely open to discussing not only their current product feature, but also share some short term offering that will be available in the near future. Day 2 at FOSE was great, looking forward to day three.
Posted on 04/05/2012