The Colloquium, one of the largest gatherings of academics, government, and industry, had Bavisi’s keynote address, entitled "The Cyber Security Quagmire: Finding the Panacea”, aimed to elucidate the information security industry’s successes, failures, and future out-of-the-box solutions that can be implemented, using the pharmaceutical industry’s fight against diseases as a model.
As the co-founder and President of one of the largest IT Security certification bodies in the world, EC-Council, and the co-creator of the groundbreaking Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification that launched ethical hacking as a mainstream career, Bavisi lent an interesting and unique perspective to the event.
Bavisi pointed out that while the medical industry has been able to nearly eradicate diseases such as polio and small pox through medical vaccinations, the information security industry hasn’t yet been able to achieve similar success against the scourges of cyberspace because of the lack of implementation of its vaccine equivalent: secure coding.
Throwing more light on this Jay Bavisi said, “We have unknowingly followed on the same path as the pharma industry. We quarantined our networks from attacks via firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and intrusion prevention systems. When this was insufficient, we introduced cyber hygiene by introducing security awareness programs, which introduced policies, processes, and controls.” Bavisi went on to say that the next step should be a cyber-vaccine in order to propel the world’s organizations into a more secure future.
Bavisi continued by linking the results of a recent national level secure coding competition being conducted in India with nearly five thousand participants, Code Uncode, to the continuing plague of insecurity. Findings from the Code Uncode competition decisively prove there is a serious lack of knowledge in secure coding practices that could be a causative source of security breaches around the world.
The Colloquium is active throughout the year and holds an annual conference in June. Conference information is available on the Colloquium website at http://www.cisse.info. The Colloquium board consists of members such as Brenda Oldfield, formerly the Director of the National Cyber Security Division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; William Maconachy, PhD and former deputy senior computer science authority at the National Security Agency (NSA); as well as Daniel P Shoemaker, PhD, and Principal Investigator and Senior Research Scientist at UDM’s Center for Cyber Security and Intelligence Studies.
About EC-Council
EC-Council (International Council of E-Commerce Consultants) is one of the world’s largest certification bodies for Information Security professionals. EC-Council is a member-based organization that certifies individuals in various information security and e-business skills. It has been certified by American National Standards Institute to meet its ANSI 17024 standard. It is the owner and creator of the world famous Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), Computer Hacking Forensics Investigator (CHFI) and EC-Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA)/License Penetration Tester (LPT) programs, and as well as many others programs. These programs are offered in over 92 countries and over have trained over 120,000 & certified more than 60,000 security professionals through a training network of over 500 training partners globally.
Individuals who have achieved EC-Council certifications include those from some of the finest organizations around the world such as the US Army, the FBI, Microsoft, IBM and the United Nations.
For more information visit: www.eccouncil.org
