Tuesday 29 March 2011

Cloud Security Alliance UK & Ireland

I am delighted to have been appointed to the executive board of the new UK & Ireland chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance. I'm Chair of the Advisory Board which will give me plenty to work on over the next few months! I gave the keynote at our inaugural chapter meeting last week and really enjoyed the feedback and audience participation. Our next event is on Thursday 21 April when we are hosting a summit in London, inside Infosecurity Europe 2011.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Cyber Security In Real-Time Systems and CNI

I'm going to be speaking at an event focused on cyber security threats and protection strategies for real time and critical national infrastructure (CNI) systems in Reading on 18 March. This subject area is finally getting some attention since the Stuxnet worm and I'm keen to help give some pragmatic advice.

09:30 - Coffee reception
10:00 - Welcome address
10:15 - CSIRS Threat Analysis and Actions
11:00 - Security Testing in Critical Systems
12:00 - Q&A Panel discussion
12:30 - Closing remarks
13:00 – Lunch

For more information contact David Spinks, Chairman of CSIRS at dspinks41@gmail.com

Saturday 12 February 2011

Cloud Security Alliance UK and Ireland

Good news for those of us involved in cloud security in this part of the world: the UK & Ireland Chapter of the CSA is now up and running. As an executive board member I'm keen to spread the word of course. If you are interested in cloud security, follow this link to the LinkedIn group - it's free to join. Go on - you know you want to :-)

Tuesday 18 January 2011

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager ...

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed.

The car careered almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know", said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no", said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."

"Well", said the Software Engineer, "before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

(With thanks to John Mitchell)

Saturday 1 January 2011

Festive Greetings

Season's greetings dear readers - it been a while, thanks to a combination of overwork and illness, but here at last is a new posting from FPWS. I'll make it simple and festive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDTjXjQJ75o

Happy New Year to everyone!