Josh Arrington
After a jam-packed week in San Francisco, the CyberArk team is home – a little tired but also inspired by our experiences at IT security’s biggest conference of the year – RSA 2012. In addition to the great buzz associated with the launch of our brand new product – Privileged Session Manager version 7 –we decided to use this week’s IT Security Rewind to reflect on the week and provide you our take on major RSA show news and events.
Art Coviello Takes the Hot Seat…
Ahead of his keynote presentation that kicked of RSA, Art Coviello sat down with AllThingsDigital reporter Arik Hesseldahl, to answer seven questions about one of the most highly publicized cyber-security attacks that occurred almost one year ago – the RSA security token hack. While he didn’t reveal anything new about the hack, Art did offer his words of advice, “the bottom line is that we do hope, in the final analysis, that people have more of a sense of urgency in protecting themselves, because the truth of the matter is that we weren’t alone.” This quote set the tone for the RSA show as IT professionals looked back on a year of sophisticated APT’s and examined the future of how we will go about protecting ourselves.
Verizon gives a preview…
In time for RSA, Verizon published a snapshot of data from its upcoming 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, revealing that more than 85 percent of the data breach incident response cases investigated by Verizon Business last year originated from a hack, and more than 90 percent of them came from the outside rather than via a malicious insider or business partner. However, the preview also found that “the most commonly used venue for breaches was exploiting default or easily guessed passwords, with 29 percent of the cases last year.” RSA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are just a few organizations that learned the privileged identity management lesson the hard way.
If you forgot to tune in on Sunday…
Keeping with some core themes from the RSA show…if you’re curious to hear what retired Gen. Mike Hayden, former head of the National Security and Central Intelligence agencies had to say about Stuxnet and similar cyber weapons, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Sunday that shows just how real cyber threats are and how serious government agencies are taking the threat of future attacks. FBI Director Robert Mueller stated, “I do believe that the cyber threat will equal or surpass the threat from counterterrorism in the foreseeable future.” If you missed “Stuxnet: Computer worm opens new era of warfare” you can watch the full segment here.
What were your best RSA moments this year? Comment below!
