Here be Dragons – SIGINT won’t go away in 2016 (or later)

René Pfeiffer/ January 20, 2016/ Conference

The new year is a couple of weeks old. Not much has changed from the perspective of information security. The word „cyber“ is still alive and kicking (just as the „cloud“ is, despite Safe Harbour not being safe any more). Crypto is being used as a scapegoat for major intelligence failures – again and again. Blaming mathematics is really easy, because few understand how cryptography protects the infrastructures all around us. Big Data and collecting intel is still going strong. In fact Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) is now part of our society; some say it’s even a part of our culture. Want to know what SIGINT in big scale looks like? Well, Duncan Campbell explained the SIGINT monster in depth at the DeepSec conference in 2015. Have a look at the video recording. 2016 promises

Read More

DeepSec 2015 Keynote: Can Societies manage the SIGINT Monster?

René Pfeiffer/ October 27, 2015/ Conference, Discussion

Gathering data has become very important in the past years. Everyone is talking about intelligence of all shades, few know what it actually means and how you do it properly (we got a workshop for that, if you are interested). Information security needs to anticipate threats and adapt the defences accordingly. The same is true for other areas where security plays an important role, such as national defence. There are also new threats. Surveillance systems expand steadily, and the facts about them were published after 2013. The impact effects all of us, especially companies moving data around and communicating digitally. Although is it difficult to gauge what it means for your daily business, you should not close your eyes and assume that it is somebody else’s problem. We have asked Duncan Campbell to paint

Read More