Heading home from New York this afternoon after a great two day trip.  I spent day one working with sales people on effectively presenting security strategies to their clients in a series of one-on-one meetings.  Day two, I was invited by Symantec and one of their top partners, to speak to a group of executives over lunch at Jack’s Steakhouse.  A couple of things that make this particular time in history interesting….

If you’re not up to date on Stuxnet and how malware evolved to a new level over the past 18 months, you need to be.  It’s rare that I read Vanity Fair, but this a linked article is worth a read to catch up on over a year of analysis and developments – cyberwar is finally a reality!  But just as important – this kind of technology poses an entirely new level of threat to your clients.  (Read it!)

Secondly – while Wikileaks and the fiasco involving Pvt. Mannings is not new news, the implications are significant.  Reading through the developments between the Anonymous group, Mastercard, Paypal, and Amazon demonstrate that groups like this do have the power to affect large corporate networks at will.  Add Gawker in there and you see that stealing the account database and decrypting it is not that difficult when dealing with real hackers.

Most of my audience didn’t know our power girds, airforce traffic control, and F-35 databases have been hacked over the past year.  Why?  These are important events that demand companies take action and start thinking seriously about securing data.  This is not a simple task…learn to articulate this and you may find yourself advising these firms at the highest levels.

© 2011, David Stelzl