Rethinking cyber security

It is clear that the Internet is transforming the way we live and the recent decades have witnessed dramatic developments in information and communication technologies (ICT). Along with the phenomenal growth in technology enabled information economy has been a growth in computing technology related crimes. Security and privacy issues have become increasingly significant over the years and expected to continue to dominate the technology scene with the increased focus on digital economy and dramatic growth in social networking and the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing by businesses. In this talk I will begin with a brief look at current trends in the technology scenery and some of the key security issues that are impacting on business and society. In particular, I will describe the notion that I refer to as increasing threat velocity, with more and more attacks and their dynamic nature, an evolving set of bad guys with different motives and sophisticated easy to use tools readily available for ordinary users to conduct severe attacks. Hence there is a need for security professionals and researchers to rethink about cyber threats and how to respond to them. In this regard, we will examine attribution which is one of the key issues when it comes to counteracting security attacks. The unauthenticated nature of the Internet makes attribution difficult and furthermore has implications on accountability. Then the talk will focus on attacks and risks in cloud computing, where issues of security, trust and accountability are particularly significant. Cloud computing with its shared multi-tenancy environment aggravates the traditional security threats. Trust that cloud providers will provide proper security measures to counteract the security threats and ensure availability of services and data stored data become paramount. We will conclude the talk by discussing some key security technologies that are relevant for cloud services.