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Conference Recap: Defcon

Last week I went to Defcon, the premiere security conference that attracted 15,000 security experts and Will Smith to Las Vegas.

Here are a few lessons I learned hanging out with the worlds finest:

  1. All your data are belong to us.Security is often relegated to an after-thought in the application development realm, when data security should be a first priority, especially for startups that deal with a users personal data.

  2. Big data analytics are not immune to infiltration.When companies run analytics over their data, their datas quality is never brought into question. In reality, spoofing data or simply inserting enough fake data points is enough to bring any clustering algorithm to its knees. The main solution: guard your input sources, and make sure you are not opening yourself up to attack.

  3. When in doubt, check for hands.Most cases of data breach have some human element involved: A lone USB drive that was plugged into the network, or a password that was written down in plain sight. Address any form of input as a potential attack vector.

Security in Big Data will only increase in importance as more companies look to seek patterns through their data.

That is, until next year!

Good night, Defcon.

Good night, Defcon.