RSA, HiMSS and Cybersecurity

It was difficult to avoid the barrage of headlines coming out of the last week’s annual RSA Conference, the purported largest annual gathering of security professionals in the world. Cyberthreats, personal privacy, the FBI and Apple, backdoor encryption, malware attacks, and of course connected devices, were all topics that dominated the public RSA blogsphere.

In an interesting sidenote, RSA Editor Jennifer Lawinski with the assistance of ISACA presented data from a research study they performed to categorize the top cybersecurity areas of interest for this year’s conference based on the 10 most common phrases used in RSA 2016 speaking submissions. Here they are from 1 to 10:

1. Internet of Things
2. Industrial controls
3. Encryption
4. Artificial intelligence and machine learning
5. Crowdsourcing
6. The role of the researcher
7. Healthcare and auto industry
8. Security and the board
9. Privacy and the role of legislation
10. The inevitability of a breach

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that IoT was number 1 and the impact of connected sensors on industrial control systems was right behind. The heightened interest in the Industrial Internet of Things was quite evident during a focused session on Securing the Internet of Things with Trusted Computing that was organized by the Trusted Computing Group. During that session, Wibu-Systems and Infineon Technologies demonstrated “IP Protection and Flexible Licensing applied to TPM Connected Devices”. Together, we showed how to protect an industrial application against reverse engineering and counterfeiting and securely license individual features. Technologies such as those we demonstrated at RSA are enabling new, safe business models for intelligent and connected IoT devices.

For a broader perspective on the security implications driven by the emergence of the smart, Industrial Internet, you can register or join us live for our Webinar, Smart Factories Redefine Security Paradigms, on Wednesday, March 9, at 8 a.m. PST. The Industrial Internet Consortium, founded to facilitate discussion between the leading vendors in IIoT and guide the future generation of intelligent manufacturing, will join us for this one hour discussion.

Coincidentally, (or maybe not), cybersecurity was also at center stage during last week’s Cybersecurity Symposium during the HiMSS16 Annual Conference and Exhibition. The security conversation there centered around the proliferation of connected medical devices and their potential associated vulnerabilities, the complexity contributed by the addition of smartphones and other personal devices into the network security mix, and the move of many medical device manufacturers to the cloud. This is a very important discussion and one that we are closely involved with as well, and will be reporting on critical challenges and solutions for the medical device community here in the future. In the meantime, you can delve deeper into the medical device security discussion in this article, Stay Secure, written by Wibu-Systems Founder and CEO, Oliver Winzenried.