The Security Playbook 2013: Lessons from the Road

For the last couple of months, a few of us security types at Guidance Software have taken our show on the road to talk about new tactics in cyber and information defense. At selected cities across the United States (and coming soon in Europe), we have worked with technology and industry partners to present highly relevant new tactics at the Security Roadshow 2013: Cyber Defense under the Assumption of Compromise. We are really enjoying the interaction and the insights we get from our partners and the professionals who attend each half-day seminar.

Not only are these Security Playbook events ripe with opportunities for learning from our security specialists and our partners’ best and brightest, but they dish up the best of the new best practices, techniques, and technologies from everyone in the room. Here are some of the lessons we have learned from you and your peers while out on the road.

The Jury is Still Out on BYOD
Some of you trust in your ability to implement effective policies and procedures, but more of you do not. Some of you feel that being forced to support it in your organizations is inevitable, so you may as well have policies in place, while others think that’s just asking for trouble. The one point on which everyone agrees is that BYOD represents one, big risk factor.

Best Practices: Mirror, Mirror and Befriending the Enemy
One of the highlights of each Security Playbook event kicks off when we ask for best practices that you and your security teams have put in place to deal with cyber defense. One of the most memorable was the approach taken by one financial institution, which told us that for every core member of their executive team, they keep an exact and current replica of his or her computer available in the case of compromise of the primary system. Scalable? Probably not, but the security professional who shared this best practice swore by it. Other best practices? An InfoSec executive for a global retailer revealed that he and his team spend time in hacker forums posing as hackers themselves to obtain intelligence on the latest trends in malware development.

The Hard Cost of One Insider Threat: Millions of Dollars and 700 Jobs
We can accuse the media of scare tactics that help sell banner ads, but the truth is that real incidents of insider threats can take down a company. One security chief who attended our seminar told how his company had been the victim of industrial espionage through the bribing of an employee with access to computer code. The incident cost the company millions of dollars, which forced them to take extreme measures to cut costs, including a reduction in workforce--from 1000 employees to 300. The moral of the story is that the risk of insider threats require just as much proactive security as does the risk of external cyber attacks.

Join us in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, D.C.
We would like to hear your best practices and share some of ours. If you would like to attend the closest Security Playbook 2013 event, click through to find more information and register here. And we invite you to share ideas in the Comments section below.