At a time when even unborn kids flaunt the web with their own accounts and the cybercrooks globetrot virtually to exploit every network and system, security providers have turned to don the roles of defense forces in the virtual world. A glance in India wherein individuals and corporates turn a blind eye towards the severity of cyber war threats makes it imperative to create more awareness. The attempt of SiliconIndia to enlighten the Indian crowd about cybercrime, malware incidents, data breaches and compliance legislation through the SiliconIndia Security Conference 2010 met with an applaudable response. More than 600 attendees packed the NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bangalore to listen to the experts from Symantec, Novell, McAfee, Wipro, Mindtree, RSA, Niksun, Juniper Networks and Paladion.

Securing the Networks
Computers and the networks that connect the innumerous computers around the world have gone on from being wondrous innovations to pervasive business necessities in today’s world. The challenge to system and network security is the explosion of Information. Unsecured information has become a liability today. We also see the growth of unstructured data pegging at over 60 percent per year. It is expected that the total volume of digital information will reach 1,773 exabytes by 2011.

With increasing business deals being carried over the virtual world, systems are getting more complex and heterogeneous and thus more prone to cyber crime or data breaches. Shantanu Ghosh, Vice President, Enterprise Security & India Product Operations at Symantec immediately pinpoints the solution which lies in a connected enterprise. “It can be done through consumerization of IT, social networking sites, different mobile devices, and cloud and virtualization,” he says. A holistic information approach to security should be taken in this regard that should be risk based and policy driven, information centric with actionable intelligence and well managed infrastructure. And when we say an information centric model, it should compile information governance, information intelligence and information infrastructure.

Data-driven Protection
Numerous concepts are put on test to understand the data structure. One such concept is Network Forensics. While IDS, IPS, Firewalls and Log Analysis are some of the state of the art cyber defenses available, network forensics is an evolving field in the security landscape.