Call for strengthened security during economic crunch

20 Nov 08

“We need to be more vigilant than ever to avoid exposure to increased exploitation," Schmidt said in his address to 500 senior information risk and security professionals at the ISF 19th Annual World Congress in Barcelona.

"Cybercrime is on the rise and profit-driven attacks are replacing random individual hacker attacks targeted at critical, core business applications and data repositories that underpin global business and commerce," said Schmidt.

"Information security can only be solved through a combination of technology, business processes, education and training and greater involvement of qualified information security professionals in business strategy and planning."

Misperceived threats
Schmidt has been special advisor for cyberspace security to the White House and held senior security roles at eBay and Microsoft.

The Congress was opened by John Maule, Professor of Human Decision Making at Leeds University Business School, addressing the issue of how faulty thinking leads people to misperceive information security threats.

Other keynote speakers include Mark Hughes, director of BT Group Security on 'securing the supply chain in the global economy'; Marcus Robinson, a partner at PwC and Mary Aiston, director of Governance and Security at HMRC, on 'the challenges in providing assurance'; and Professor Enrique Dans from IE Business School talking about 'the real risk of lagging behind'.

Along with the main room sessions during the conference there are almost 50 break-out sessions across 10 different streams from compliance, security awareness and convergence to security tools and techniques and risk management.

"In addition to the growing number of sophisticated threats, increasing compliance demands from corporate governance and legislation are putting more pressure on senior business and information security managers," Schmidt said. "It is important that the pressure for compliance does not divert attention and investment away from solving some of the real practical risks."

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