What Breaches Teach Us

The daily drumbeat of data spills, breaches and thefts can foster breach fatigue, apathy and cynicism among even the most hardy security professionals. What sets in is a suspicion that all our efforts are for naught, and that we are perpetually a step behind the bad guys. In truth, most of these incidents are not only preventable, but they take months or years to bubble up. This talk will examine some of the more alarming trends in cybercrime today, and offer some perspectives on how businesses, consumers and infosec pros can up their game in response.

Prognosis: Still Above Ground

Talk to enough experts in the nascent field of healthcare security and it won't be long before someone points out that we currently have no data showing negative patient outcomes as a result of cybersecurity attacks or vulnerabilities. Besides not being terribly reassuring, that's a bit like saying you're bulletproof just because you've never been shot.

But assuming for the moment this statement is somehow demonstrably true, how long can we expect it to remain so when cybersecurity continuously gets relegated to a distant consideration behind all the other exigencies of patient care? And particularly when almost every aspect of healthcare is being re-engineered to collect, store or transmit sensitive data?

Virtually all of the static details about ourselves once considered private -- our date of birth, Social security number, address, previous addresses, phone number, mother's maiden name, etc. -- are now available for sale in the cybercrime underground, thanks to an endless stream of breaches at major data aggregators. How long will it be before this becomes the reality for our biometric, genetic and healthcare data?

This talk will examine the key impediments to making cybersecurity more of a priority in the healthcare sector, and look at some ways we can make industry-wide progress on this vital aspect of patient care before it's too late.

Primetime Cybercrime

Why so many hacking intrusions? Why so many card breaches? Also, can it actually get much worse? The banks blame the retailers, the retailers blame the banks, and consumers blame everyone. We try to learn from our mistakes, but the perspective we hear the least about comes from the cyber criminals themselves — many of whom are growing increasingly organized, networked, financed and politically connected. This talk will examine the answers to those “Why” questions from the perspective of profit-seeking online crooks.