18/Jun/2019
The recent three-day InfoSecurity Europe event (June 4 to 6) gathered most of the major players in the information security business at the exhibition hall of London’s Olympia. As well as having a presence there, CyNation’s personnel were able to take in the sights and sounds of one of the biggest annual events for our industry. Steve Gibbs, our Head of Development, shared his thoughts.
“I was able to spend most of the day at the event, and got a chance to look around and chat to a lot of the companies present,” said Steve (right). “It‘s always interesting to see what everyone else in our industry is up to. Even though there are lots of great products and services out there, many stop short of the mark when providing the business with actionable intelligence.
“Many of the products available collect data from open source intelligence and provide nice charts and shiny UIs to deliver this information. However, most miss the obvious point of showing why the business should care. Why should a business care that server x has a vulnerability? It’s all very well letting the sysadmin know, but why should the business owners care? Without establishing the risk this poses to the business there is no way to know how important the vulnerability is.
“Another point – and something that is very much in CyNation’s favour – which people have complained to us about many times is that, in day-to-day work, they simply don’t want to switch between different screens and UI, no matter how pretty they might be! Our approach seems to be unique in that, rather than re-invent a more shiny wheel, we are extracting and linking data from multiple sources to provide a single view.
“Aside from these observation, there wasn’t very much that was new at this year’s event. A few years ago everyone was throwing network data in to Elasticsearch, now it’s open source intelligence and the deep/darkweb.
“It’s true of many events like this that the most prominent exhibitors tend to be offering updates and refinements of their familiar products. And smaller exhibitors tend to be playing catchup. There are of course some very interesting startup and scaleup companies who were not present at the event who we will no doubt be seeing in the years to come.
“As always the free beer was more than welcome. That was also something familiar, but that’s ok!”
