Magnet Cyber Security Briefing

By Ronan Leonard and Marie-Clare Byard

Marie-Clare and I recently attended Magnet’s Cyber Security Briefing at the Aviva Stadium. It was quite an eye opener with some interesting facts and figures mentioned which you can read about in our follow up article.

Mark Kellett opened the proceedings and told us what we would expect over the next hour and a half. The keynote speakers were Mark Fielding, the CEO of ISME, Pat Moran, Head of Cybercrime & IT Forensics, PwC and Stuart Borgman, Director of Cyber Security Engineering EMEA, Palo Alto Networks.

Mark Filelding spoke first and he mentioned some of the laws that we have to protect us including the 1991 Criminal Damages act which was updated in 2011 to give Gardai rights to carry out investigations. Mark also mentioned the four following things that businesses must do:

1) Provide security awareness for your staff, covering the basics and will go a long way to protect your business.

2) Establish a clear security policy within your company.

3) Conduct periodic test in your business.

4) Put some body in charge of security, and outsource if you don’t have an in    house resources.

Pat Moran then spoke about Cyber Security mentioning these 4 topics:

1) Why is Cyber Security such a hot topic?

2) Who is behind it and how do they do it?

3) Identifying a cyber-attack, what next?

4) Prevention is better than cure.

Stuart Borgman gave a brief background to Palo Alto Networks before mentioning the following topics:

1) The evolution of Cybercrime

2) The evolution of security

3) A fresh approach to security

4) Securing the network and endpoint

5) Fingerprinting the attacker

6) Why use Palo Alto Networks

All of the presentations given by the speakers included eye opening facts and figures which will be covered in another article. Any advice given by the speakers involved basic common sense but you would not be surprised by the amount of people and companies who have disregarded this advice.