Title: Laying Siege to Castles in the Sky
Presenter: Tom Kellermann, Vice President of Security Awareness
Date: June 8, 2010 at 6pm
Location: Teqcorner, 1616 Anderson Road, Mclean VA, 22102
Link to Event: http://cyberintelligence.eventbrite.com/
Overview:
Ancient Rome’s roads were essential to the expansive growth of the civilization, but these legendary byways also presented a double-edged sword to the Empire in creating convenient new avenues that could be travelled just as easily by nation’s enemies as they could enable vital internal commerce and trade.
In 213 B.C., the great general Hannibal led a Carthaginian army astride elephants down these very thoroughfares to engage the Roman Empire in battle within its own borders. This represented the first critical infrastructure attack in history as the Roman network of roads, one of the culture’s greatest strengths, had become its biggest Achilles’ heel.
Today we find many modern-day intruders in cyberspace, but instead of riding lumbering elephants into the heart of our nation to confront us these attackers leverage our electronic ecosystem against us via malware campaigns that target information resident on the full range of systems and devices used by organizations and end users to communicate, share data and conduct electronic transactions.
To prevent catastrophic losses of protected information and to stop attackers from gaining control of the critical infrastructure necessary to support our businesses, financial markets and even our daily lives, it is imperative that we more closely examine and assess existing pathways to our most sensitive electronic assets to better defend those resources from potential attacks before these scenarios play out.
Understanding the enemies’ tactics and developing adequate protective mechanisms to thwart those efforts is an unquestionable yet convoluted imperative in 2010.
