Attending the Virus Bulletin 'Securing Your Organization in the Age of Cybercrime' Seminar

Today, I'd like to talk about my visit to the VB seminar, where a lot of different security related subjects passed by.

Speakers at the event:

• Bryan Littlefair, Vodafone Group
• Bob Burls, Police Central e-Crime Unit
• Juraj Malcho, ESET
• David Evans, Information Commissioner's Office
• Graham Cluley, Sophos
• Alex Shipp
• Richard Martin, UK Payments Administration
• Andrew Lee, K7 Computing
• Martin Overton, IBM

Things like "What is a Botnet" by Bob Burls or "Social Diseases Facebook/Twitter" by Andrew Lee to a technical analysis of the Stuxnet worm by Juraj Malcho. 

All in all, the room was filled with security "brains" who all seemed to know a great deal about their subject.

The most important subject to me, was about Social Networks (or diseases, as Andrew called them :) ) and the dangers to their users. The threat is real, and users fail to accept or understand this. The recent Firesheep addon for Firefox is an example of this. Just sit down at your local McDonald's to enjoy the free public WiFi there, only later finding out, that your login was used to post spam or malicious links on your wall. 

Or worse.. they pretend they are you, and invade your friends private lives, by using the address details of your friends. To prevent Firesheep from "hijacking" your session details, I advise you to NOT use your favourite Facebook/Twitter account on a network you do not know. There is no telling in who is watching you, and everything you do on their network could be monitored.

Also, keeping the above in mind, you might want to think before clicking a link from a friend to a Britney Spears nude video you'd love to see. They could be compromised just as easy.

The bottom line of the seminar; The education of our users will lead to a safer tomorrow. Let yourself be educated!