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 to get very „cyber“ indeed. SIGINT is now part of your IT infrastructure. The problem is: It’s not run by you. This means it’s time to think about this dreaded metadata and what it means to your way of life and way of business.