Beach to Breach - It's not just for work data!

   I heard a great term recently... Beach to Breach.  SC Magazine did an article about a Sourcfire study on employees bringing their portable devices on vacation.  They found that 77% of employees bring their devices with them on vacation to keep in touch with work and that 97% of the use is email.

   Hopefully you can see some of the security problems right away... the devices have a good chance of getting lost or stolen when one is out of their "element"; plenty of opportunities to connect to unknown networks; potential to use hotel printers; possible "incentive" to bypass controls to see that one "important" message, and of course; sand in our devices!

   Organizations certainly should be concerned about the potential for breach of data or loss of equipment.  But what about the rest of us?  Should we take extra precautions with our personal devices and information when out of town?... Definitely!

CISOs are from Mars, CIOs are from Venus

   I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Argyle CIO Leadership Forum in Chicago.  I sat on a couple of panels and had some fun delivering a talk called "CISOs are from Mars, CIOs are from Venus" (slideshare).
   There was a clear theme of cloud, mobile and BYOD.  There were both CIOs and CISOs in attendance so there were different perspectives on these challenges.  That certainly tied into my closing keynote.

   After the conference I was interviewed by the conference organizer.  The interview will be posted on the conference website, but here is a copy:

The Business (not Blind) Side

   A Doctor, Lawyer, Salesperson and Systems Adminstrator walk into a bar...

   As I mentioned last week, the Secure360 conference was in town.  And as always, it was a great show.  I was pretty busy and had 3 different talks.  The first was a 4 hour pre-conference session on BYOD. (slides here)

   After talking about the history of portable devices and framing the issues with which organizations struggle, we did something a bit different.

One Size Does Not Fit All

   The annual Secure360 conference kicked off yesterday in St. Paul with pre-conference sessions. 
Secure360 is the major upper Midwest security conference and has become a US national event, now in its 11th year (I think!).

   I'll be pretty busy at this year's conference.  I've actually spoken at every Secure360, but this year I did a half-day seminar yesterday on BYOD, and tomorrow I've got back-to-back talks - one on the Insider Threat I call "The Accidental Insider" (blog post), and one on authentication "3 Factors of Fail" (blog series starts here).  Slides for all are on my slideshare site.

   I've got a wide variety of topics to cover!

   And that's what is so cool, and critical, about conferences.