The Adventures of TinTin and Snowy

I was away this week to attend InfoSecurity Europe 2005 in London which is Europe's "number one, dedicated Information Security event". It was a great excuse to get out of the office and go rub shoulders with fellow IT geeks. Little did I know how geeky they would be. I was dressed to kill and immediately felt out of place when I entered the exhibition. Majority of the visitors wore rumpled suits, askew ties and had beleagured expressions on their faces. These were truly harassed people constantly protecting the perimeters of their networks. I headed straight for the seminar rooms, hoping to bump into 'not-so-obvious-geeks' but without much success. They wore jeans in the seminars. Sacrilage!! The first day whizzed past as I went from one seminar room to the other, from one keynote speaker to another. As the days progressed, I emerged out of my cloud of ignorance of security related matters. Every speaker was a harbinger of dooms day, the end of the world. I slowly realised how naked I felt. How naked my company is against a determined cyber criminal.

Gone are the days when a hacker was a snotty nosed spotty teenager sitting hunched over his PC in his room, attacking companies for fun or just to prove that they could do it. Today, cyber crime is properly entrenched in the Mafia's domain. Its a lucrative industry. There are cyber gangs out there and viruses being developed just to destroy rival viruses . Heads of research in anti-virus companies have been assasinated. Lives have been threatened. Blood has been spilt. The end result? That irritating little spam mail advertising Viagra. How much viagra can one person buy?

What really worried me was a comment made by Eugene Kaspersky, Head of Kaspersky Labs, that spammers and virus makers have merged forces and have become much smarter. Instead of spamming the world with a virus/trojan epidemic( e.g. Netsky, Sasser, MyDoom etc.) and getting more information from all the infected PCs out there than they can handle, they've decided to go covert. Viruses and trojans have inbuilt timing mechanisms in them now. They only infect a few thousand PCs, not enough for a big fuss to be made and therefore, no new patches or signatures created to protect computers. Use the information from these PCs, and then, turn themselves off and become harmless files. Then affect another few thousand PCs. The cycle goes on. This effectively means that we could have some trojan or virus or spyware on our computer and we don't know abou it. And neither does any antivirus program. Now THATs scary.

Well on a lighter note, I was surprised to see the number of skimply clad women in this show also. But I suppose geeks are easy targets for voluptuous women in barely anything. Who can resist a Unified Threat Management System or a neural intelligence application firewall when its being sold by a gorgeous blonde in panties? Unfortunately, I don't have pics to back up my story, so you'll have to trust me. It would have been odd if I went up to them and snapped pics with my Samsung D500. Where are my thick skinned mates when I need them?

Anyway, the weekend is here. Not just any old weekend. But Bank Holiday weekend. We're driving over to Frosty's place in Lincoln. He's got back together with Hilary after 8 months. Thank god. I'm gonna try my best not to make him force me into binge drinking. But Ani's ruining the long weekend by volunteering to work on Monday. What rot!!

I think Steve Fowler has started bloggin too. But I can't be sure. Considering the fact that I had 7 Steves in my MSc course, its not too much of a hint when a MK Steve leaves a comment and has an incomplete profile. What the hell is MK?