Doing what I do in my day job, I sit
through a lot of presentations on various aspects of security. I had the
pleasure of sitting through a couple of presentations this week (one by a
leading analyst on Web 2.0 security issues, and one by a vendor CTO). My short
version of the takeaways from the talk were that there are a huge number of
security issues related to Web 2.0 technologies, including cross-site scripting
and many more. Many of these existed before Web 2.0, but are exacerbated by
Without rehashing a lot of the detail from
the event, the thing that really struck me was how similar my own internalized
summary from t
he event was to almost every other security presentation I have
heard in the last five years or so. You could almost use this as the punch line
to every security issues talk: “The security issues are not generally well
understood yet, they are going to be very significant, we’re pretty much
screwed, and we don’t know where the solutions to the problem are going to come
from.“
It’s a depressing conclusion to reach at
the end of most talks on IT security. And I'm generally an optimistic person, so it's not like this is my "glass half empty" self talking.
I am also wading through Geekonomics,
which appears to do a very good job of describing the big picture of how the IT
industry has reached this particular place at this moment.
Jim Hietala, GSEC, GCFW and CISSP, is the principal of Compliance Research Group, providing research, analysis, and consulting services in the areas of compliance, risk management, and IT security. Jim has provided consulting services to organizations such as SANS, The Open Group Security Forum, Logical Security, and a number of IT security and compliance vendors. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and he recently authored a comprehensive course on IT risk management. He participates in the SANS Analyst/Expert program, having written several whitepapers and participated in several webcasts for SANS. He has also published numerous articles on information security, risk management, and compliance topics in publications including The ISSA Journal, Bank Accounting & Finance, Risk Factor, and others. He holds a B.S. in Marketing from Southern Illinois University. Editorial focus: Compliance, Risk Management, IT Security, IT-GRC software, HIPAA, GLBA, Privacy
Jim can be reached at: jim@compliancefocus.com
