InfoSec is done for another year, always a huge IT Security event, not just for the UK but for Europe. As with every year there were some key themes running through the event. This year the big talking points were Advanced Persistent Threats, Cloud, BYOD and Encryption solutions.
From my untrained eye the numbers seemed to be down from previous years, I attended all three days and by far Day 2 was the busiest. I was also scanned about 20 times as I went in and out of the venue across the 3 days, I did wonder how many times that would count as being a visitor in the overall count?
The only time it felt cramped was when attending talks, I tried to attend a talk by Trevor Kennedy (one of our regular contributors) from Trend Micro. On Day 1 I turned up a couple of minutes before the scheduled time only to find I could not get within five meters of the stand, it was that packed, Day 2 was pretty much the same, I managed to catch his presentation Day 3 by bribing my way to a seat at the front. His talk was about protecting data as you move to the cloud, clearly a popular and timely topic and as per usual Trevor nailed it, he really is one of the strongest public speakers in our industry.
It wasn’t just his talk, a number of the technical talks in the dedicated theatres at the back of the venue were also packed like a London underground tube during morning rush hour. Joe Hancock, from BAE had an interesting talk on designing solution with the security in mind upfront, an “ensure the barn door is bolted” approach to security, his approach made a lot of sense. This was followed by a discussion by Mike Gaffney, Ladbrokes and how they used behavioural analysis to find suspicious activity, clever stuff.
The Securing CNI Panel (Dave Clemente, Chatham House, John Milne, Bank of England, Peter Gibbons, Network Rail and Mark Jones, BAA) was the highlight of the Keynote talks, which were less packed, mainly because they were not easy to find being hidden up stairs away from the main conference area.
One of the trends I was disappointed in was the distinct lack of booth babes. It might not be politically correct but the last few years having booth babes walking around dressed as nurses, police or robots, was always a pleasant distraction. The lack of booth babes came as no surprise however as InfoSec had previously updated their T&Cs to essentially ban “inappropriate, revealing and offensive” attire at the show.
This year, one booth, yes one, had booth babes, so a hat tip to the boys at ForeScout for resisting the politically correct trend of eliminating the booth babes. Maybe the politically correct should get rid of cheerleaders or the F1 lady’s?