For the seventh time in as many years, the Tech-Security Conference returned this week to Southern California as part of a cross-country tour in which attendees heard both technical presentations and saw the latest in Internet security products. Those who attended were there because they needed to keep their employers’ or clients’ networks safe from threats, external as well as internal.

Topics at the conference, held at the Marriott Hotel in Woodland Hills, covered ways to strengthen incident response, email security, threats and countermeasures, secure business solutions, end-point security solutions, LAN security, the security landscape, and data loss and leakage. A final indicator of how interested an attendee was in the overall conference might have been measured by whether she stayed until the day's final talk by IBM’s Will Irace describing the holistic approach that IBM is taking in addressing security threats.

IBM's presentation introduced a new data protection model to guard against data loss. It employs roadblocks, password protected ZIP files, visible monitoring, just-in-time education, full disk encryption, network forensics, and network appliances.

Among the sobering statistics to emerge from the conference were:
· Some 673,000 laptops were lost in 2005
· An estimated 11,000 were left behind in taxis.
· The eventual whereabouts of all the laptop data is anyone's guess!

IBM’s ISS division claims that stopping data leakage requires a comprehensive suite of security software and services that begins with an assessment/discovery process and includes security training prior to installation of the solutions required.
Others at the conference concerned with data leakage prevention (DLP) included Carlos Sanz of Lumension Security (www.lumension.com) who said DLP is a huge issue today and noted that in California, a loss of data in the financial services industry requires immediate public disclosure.

Sarah Jacks of Sendio (www.sendio.com) was there to show how the company's anti-spam appliance does battle with the world's purveyors of malware. Like many other point solutions, the Sendio ICE Box is a separate server that houses the software products and provides a safe and stable environment from which to fight malware flooding the Internet and nosing into companies' email servers.

Dyntek’s Clancy Barham (www.dyntek.com) was demonstrating how unique each person's keyboarding style is. Think we all type alike? The company's  Bio Password software can detect the difference between your entering your ID and password and someone else typing in the exact same phrases.

Chris Bramhall at TippingPoint (www.tippingpoint.com) spoke about the firm's Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), saying that compliance is driving many activities in network security today and that California has a record for stronger compliance measures than most.

Pete Elliot and Sandy Nannini of Key Information Systems (www.keyinfo.com) demonstrated the breadth of IBM/ISS’ network security solutions and stressed the importance of Key’s assessment process as a critical first step in initiating an analysis of an enterprise’s network security needs.

Finally, Don Wisdom of Datalink Networks (www.datalinknetworks.net), a reseller of security, network, server and storage solutions, identified what he believes today's preeminent security issues are as the following:
1. What are effective ways to secure wireless networks?
2. The convergence of data, wireless, and VOIP networks
3. The trend toward security point-products being absorbed by larger end-to-end solution providers
4. The emergence of network forensics

What did this reporter leave with from the conference?  First, I concluded that the little guys (single product point solutions) are being gobbled up by those offering bigger end-to-end solutions. Second, many of the point-solution ISVs prefer to offer their software in an appliance.

Among the miscellaneous bits of trivia from the show that suggest malware is a problem growing costlier by the day are the following:
· It costs $113 per employee per year to find email erroneously stopped by spam filters (Source: Sendio).
· Some 36 percent of firms in one study lost business because email went astray.
· One law firm was fined by a district court because a critical message was lost in a spam filter.

The Data Connectors-sponsored conference moves on to Nashville Feb. 6, then San Jose on Feb. 20. For the full schedule, visit http://www.dataconnectors.com/.