Whichever metrics you choose to employ, 2013 was a bumper year for the information security industry: An unholy mix of awesome research, APT drama and and the (almost expected) comedy of errors. "Cyberwar" started the year strong but lost ground to "opsec" as the years most overused (but least understood) terms.
Dozens of leaked documents, hundreds of conferences, thousands of talks and about a squillion inane tweets: we braved them all and carefully picked the most notable to give you a healthy summary, in under an hour**.
If you are keen to see which topics dominated the zeitgeist, which topics managed to escape the headlines despite being eminently profound and which topics we believe will be biting us soon, then join us. Give us an hour, we will give you 2013.
** That's a better compression ratio than gzip for the same price!
Haroon Meer is the founder of Thinkst, an applied research company with a deep focus on information security. Haroon has contributed to several books on information security and has published a number of papers on various topics related to the field. Over the past decade he has delivered research talks and keynotes at conferences around the world, from traditional information security conferences like Black Hat/Defcon to industry conferences like Microsoft Tech-Ed to academic conferences like ISSA. For about a decade he has built and delivered training to staff of fortune 500s, law enforcement, and militaries all over the world on how to attack and break into applications and networks.
Marco Slaviero is the lead researcher at Thinkst. Marco has presented research at conferences all over the world on topics ranging from timing attacks to python shellcode. He is rumoured to harbor a personal dislike for figs.
Amit Yoran serves as Senior Vice President of Unified Products at RSA, where he provides leadership for RSA's product development and product management organizations. In 2006, Mr. Yoran founded NetWitness Corporation, a provider of network security analytic products. He served as CEO until NetWitness was acquired by RSA in 2011. Prior to NetWitness, Mr. Yoran served as Corporate Director and Investor in numerous Information Security companies. In 2003 and 2004, he served as the Director of the National Cyber Security Division and US-CERT at the Department of Homeland Security. Formerly, he served as the Vice President of Worldwide Managed Security Services at the Symantec Corporation. Mr. Yoran was the co-founder of Riptech, a market leading IT security company, and served as its CEO until the company was acquired by Symantec in 2002. He was an officer in the United States Air Force and was a founding member of the Department of Defense's Computer Emergency Response Team.
RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration. RSA helps the world's leading organizations solve their most complex and sensitive security challenges. These challenges include managing organizational risk, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration, proving compliance, and securing virtual and cloud environments.
Combining business-critical controls in identity assurance, encryption & key management, SIEM, Data Loss Prevention, Continuous Network Monitoring, and Fraud Protection with industry leading eGRC capabilities and robust consulting services, RSA brings visibility and trust to millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform and the data that is generated. For more information, please visit www.RSA.com and www.EMC.com.