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Underground Economies – The rise of Intellectual Capital Theft.
By now I hope readers have seen the latest latest report from McAfee that I was involved in – “Underground Economies” where McAfee and SAIC collaborated to investigate perceptions around intellectual capital – the “secret sauce” of companies. The report surveyed over 1,000 senior IT decision makers across the world, getting their opinion on where they thought their valuable data was, their attitude to outsourcing control of it, and questions around how it was protected and the risk of it being “misplaced”.
You can read more from the actual report, or see my corporate blog. There’s been a lot of press on this report, such as
Speaking At McAfee Focus 2010 Paris…
This week for those in snowy-Europe, you can find myself along with co-conspirators such as Dave DeWalt, George Kurtz, and dozens of other speakers at the Focus Paris event.
With over 400 people predicted to turn out, and a full agenda of speakers including Philippe Trouchaud from PricewaterhouseCooper, Gérard LEVICKI from BT France, Vasco Gomes and Pete Colley of CSC, and Ricky Magalhaes of E2E, it promises to be a full, enlightening, and I hope fun day!
Feel free to look me up if you are attending, and if you have a good joke for me, I’ll be offering custom McAf.ee short urls in exchange.
De sécurité n’a pas à être insupportable, mais vous pouvez trouver mes tentatives de parler français une parodie.
“And The Audience Says…” – Feedback from the Amsterdam Executive Summit
Last month I was invited to speak at our Executive Summit in Amsterdam, where 100 or so CIOs, CEOs and other executives from the Benelux area came to hear what McAfee was up to, and tell us where we were going right (and wrong).
Not content with talking at them for the day, we plied them with good wine, crispy bread and sandwiches which you could never find the equal in Subway or Quiznos. We also gave out some homework, asking participants to complete a survey of their security concerns which came back with some interesting results: Read more…
Speaking at the ISMS Forum Spain re Innovation..
A reminder for my European contacts, that I’ll be speaking at ISMS Spain in Madrid next week on the 25th May. The topic is “The role of CTO’s in Innovation, and promises to be a lively discussion. Joining me will be Mark Bregman, CIO Symantec, Nikolay Grebennikov, CTO, Kaspersky Lab, and Juan Miguel Velasco, Ass Dir of Security Services at Telefonica.
McAfee launches new Community Portal…
This week on the 4th November McAfee will go live with the new community forum (http://community.mcafee.com) . Designed to give customers a voice to discuss McAfee products, and to interact with each other and informal advisers within McAfee, the forum has grown to be quite dynamic over time. So much so that it was recently moved onto the excellent Jive platform, giving a lot more capacity and a greater feature set. The community does not replace the official support processes, but it’s a great way to discuss ideas and problems with your peers.
I’m the moderator for the Data Protection communities at the moment, so, if it’s of interest to you I’d love to see you on there – sign up is free for all. Launch date is the 4th November.
Speaking at Focus 2009, Vegas on October 7th.
On October 7th I’ll be chairing a “Birds Of A Feather” session on the use of McAfee encryption products at our 2nd Annual user conference – Focus 2009. This session will be a chance to put me on the “Hot Seat”, and a chance to ask probing questions about McAfee’s current, and future product strategy.
I’ve done a few of these in the past, some have been very constructive, and have led to wide ranging product changes based on customer experiences we just didnt consider, some have been mud-slinging sessions though. I hope we’ll have the former, though I’m quite happy to sit through both.
For those coming to Focus who read this Blog, please feel free to find me and introduce yourselves – I’ll be at the conference answering questions and helping out throughout.
You can contact me via Twitter (CTOGoneWild) – I’ll be monitoring the #focus09 feed throughout the duration, or you can post a comment here.
I’m especially interested in knowing what kind of things you’d like to see discussed during this session, so if you have a question about our products or design strategy, tweet me (or comment) so we can properly answer them on the day.
TrueCrypt vs Peter Kleissner, Or Stoned BootKit Revisited..
Peter Kieissner
This weeks flame war between TrueCrypt and Peter Kleissner had me both upset and laughing at the same time.
For a start, hats off to young Peter (18 years old according to his site), who recently presented at Black Hat his concept for a “universal rootkit” exploit, which, using that older-than-he-is technology of MBR replacement, manages to subvert Windows in such a way as to be able to drop a payload into memory as the computer boots.
I’m not sure, but isn’t that what MBR viruses have done since day one? I guess Peter agrees because his new “Stoned Bootkit” rootkit is named “Stoned” in homage to one of the original MBR Viruses of 1987 Read more…
How to Spend Your Data Protection Dollars
I was speaking last week at a panel of CISO’s when someone asked me the very reasonable question “What’s the most important thing we should do to protect our data?” – What the audience member wanted to know really was, given that he had no budget, and a state mandate impressing on him the need to protect PII (personally identifiable information), what’s the minimum he could do to comply with the regulations? Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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