San Francisco Tech-Security Conference – November 17

It was a full day of talks and a 50-company exhibitor room for attendees at this security event. Presentations were given by McAfee, Cyber-Ark, Axway, Centrify, WatchGuard, Netgear, Blue Coat, Invincea, and Endace.

The slick security award has to go to Invincea. They are a venture-backed software company. They provide desktop security to companies with Invincea™ Browser Protection. www.invincea.com Invincea™ Browser Protection shields PC users against all types of Web-borne threats by moving desktop Web browsers into a controlled virtual environment. Invincea creates a fully isolated browser environment to help deliver PC protection. The product automatically detects and terminates a threat in real time and disposes the tainted environment. It than restarts a new one.

SC Magazine loves the product. Peter Stephenson in the January issue of SC Magazine wrote, “What we liked: Ease of use, small footprint and very creative use of a virtual machine to contain the browser and keep the malware out of the computer” The company also has a Document Protection solution. Invincea is still a privately held company. No hints about an upcoming IPO. Let’s hear it for virtual machine technology. This goes well beyond what McAfee SiteAdvisor and AVG LinkScanner offer in protection.

It’s always interesting to talk to vendors while others are running around getting their “qualify for the drawings” card initialed. Some random observations:

Say “NGFW” and security companies will respond “Palo Alto Networks.” Other companies are offering the technology, but for the time being, Next Generation Fire Wall is Synonymous with Palo Alto Networks. They weren’t at this event, by the way, (cheapskates) while Fortinet, Websense, Blue Coat and SonicWall were.

Netgear presentation bite – “Experts believe Scareware is one of the payloads that make attackers the most money.” They pushed the layered defence (sic) strategy. Gartner gives them #1 share in the sub $5k market share and #4 in the sub $25k.

Invincea - “Polymorphics will make signatures obsolete.” “$398B of research has been put at risk because of China and Russia.” “Asking our users to make the correct decision every time is a complete pipe dream.” The presenter also showed a slide from a Cyveillance study showing that F-Secure Kaspersky and Nod32 (Eset) were the quickest for Day 1 Anti-Virus “Effectiveness”.

WatchGuard – Stated that surveys of employees have shown that they spend 3 hours daily, on average, at work on personal related web surfing. Much of their presentation focused on how their product delivers granular web application control.

Axway – Considers using the cloud to perform file transfer still to be not quite fully secure. He also quoted a Ponemon Institute that the average cost of a data breach is $202 per record or$6.6M per breach. They’re in the Leader’s Quadrant (Gartner) for Managed File Transfer, Business to Business Integration, and Email Encryption.

The primary focus of the presentations was on education/knowledge sharing with only a few slides at the end being devoted to product pitches. These presentations weren’t deep dives into the company’s technologies. For the most part stats tossed out were current.

Antivirus, antimalware vendors mentioned as being “under the hood” for different vendors’ products: Commtouch, Kaspersky, Sophos, AVG. Present at the show - Eset (showing some older studies, dudes), Kaspersky, McAfee, and Sophos.

Now About Those Tchotchkes

A marketing professional at a leading edge consumer software company believes that a company's standing on the innovation scale is directly related to the creativity of their tradeshow giveaways. That said – pens, stress balls, more pens, breath mints, more breath mints, an environmentally friendly shopping bag, a squishable car shaped stress ball, a year subscription for the company’s internet security suite, something to clean your mobile phone screen, pens with a blinking red ball at the top.

The most useful tchotchke – Tectia and their aluminum sport water bottle. Winner on the cool scale - some kind of battery power multi colored LED spinning fan “thing”. A quite optimus giveaway by Blue Coat. The most impressive giveaway at the end of the day - a $700 WatchGuard appliance.

The most attended presentation was the last one. Attendees had to be present and had to have had their gift drawing card initialed by participating vendors to be eligible for the drawings. Hence, the occasional mad dash of individuals to get those puppies signed.

About the Organizers

These events are put on by www.dataconnectors.com . It appears that about 50 of these are scheduled to take place in 2012.