Black Hat: This year and last

As Black Hat came to end, we sat down with Forcepoint Principal Security Analyst Carl Leonard to get his impressions on what’s caught the attention of attendees as well as his own.

What have attendees shown interest at this year’s Black Hat versus last year’s event?

This year we’ve seen a lot of interest in cross-domain solutions (CDS) for the commercial sector, particularly from industries – finance and healthcare – that have been a primary target of threat actors.  CDS has long been used by government agencies, particularly defense and intelligence agencies to share information across networks with varying security protocols/classification levels.  The commercial sector sees value in stipulating data permissions that prevent the most important data and IP being accessed from or transferred to low security domains. Our Trusted Thin Client is one example of such technology.

At last year’s Black Hat presenters demonstrated cars could be hacked. This year we saw that  Chip and PIN  technology – now a commonplace security feature for debit and credit cards - is not immune from vulnerabilities. Were you surprised?

We actually anticipated in our 2014 Cybersecurity Predictions Report that as the financial services and retail industries escalated their defenses with security measures such as Chip and PIN technology that the manner in which these thefts were committed would morph. So it’s not surprising – to us anyway.

Any other observations from the show you’d like to share?

I spoke with more information security executives from the financial services industry and government space than in previous years. Both face a steady stream of complex threats, so it’s not unexpected they’d want to counter them with the latest in leading edge innovations.  They’re often a bell weather for what the next wave of security technology adoption will be.

We’ll be updating this space with more from our Black Hat experience. Follow us on Twitter @Forcepointsec for all the latest!