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| UP
FRONT |
| Happy Anniversary, and Perennial
Questions |
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This September marks the Institute's
4th Annual New England Network
Security Forum. What have we learned? The
insights
are too numerous to detail here. But no matter
how much threats increase or technology
changes, one thing has remained consistent:
many of the same problems tend to
plague users year after year.
Educating users, doing more
with less, and feeling frustrated with
immature commercial solutions -- these are
some of the continual challenges we hear about
at
every one of our Network Security
Forums. They continue because there are no
concrete solutions that work for every situation.
Yet there are also questions that crop up
because people -- however unwittingly -- have
forgotten the industry's past. That's
what this issue's
Faculty
Viewpoint examines: those
questions with
answers embedded in the past. One
of
them is almost rhetorical -- are security
certifications important? We explore
this question further in Data
Point.
Other
age-old questions
may
find answers
in the Institute
archives, which
become available
in September
to Institute
Partner
Program members.
The archive,
included in
Version 2.0
of the private
Institute Partner
Portal,
is searchable
by keyword,
event, type
of technology
and more. May
it jog our collective
memory. — The
Institute |
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| FACULTY
VIEWPOINT: Fred Avolio |
| The Importance
of History in Network Security |
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“It’s
still the same old story: a fight for love and
glory, a case of do or die.” These words,
made famous in the Warner Brothers’ movie
Casablanca, remind us
of what U.S. philosopher and poet George Santayana
(1863–1952)
once wrote: “Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it.”
One of the problems in the computer and network
security space is that we behave as if we have
no history. Or, perhaps we have lost our sense
of history. Either
way, we will not learn from our mistakes. We will
spend
needless
hours going over
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Fred Avolio is
a member of the Institute faculty. He is a
security consultant, writer, and instructor
who has worked with Internet
security systems for over 15 years. Write to
him at favolio@ianetsec.com.
the
same old ground, reinventing the same old
devices.
We
see evidence of this in some of the questions that
Forum Members raise, on topics such as buffer overflows,
application-level security, and certification.
Read more
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| DATA
POINT: Certification |
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"I
would recommend certification to peers or
subordinates"
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Whether
certification is a good measure of qualification is an age-old question. So we asked Forum members
in Chicago in July if they had certifications
(67% of the 36 survey respondents did, and another
19% were working toward one) and what their experiences
and thoughts about them were.
Feedback was mostly positive – three
in four certified respondents would recommend
security certification (see chart), one-quarter
were neutral, and no one would recommend against
it. Among
the 21 hiring managers in the survey, three
in four agreed certifications on resumes were
nice, but no substitute for experience, while
some
of
the others either weren’t impressed (5%)
or wouldn’t consider an applicant without
a CISSP (5%).
So even though the survey had
a small sample size, consensus was strong that
certs are a good idea – but experience
is what really counts.
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| PARTNER
PROGRAM NEWS |
| Institute Launches
Partner Portal Version 2.0 |
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The
Institute launched the next version
of the Institute Partner Program portal at the
New England Network Security Forum in September.
This rollout is laden with new features such
as a search engine that crawls through all Institute
content. Partners can search Summaries of Findings,
Multimedia Briefing Summaries and more, by keyword,
Forum date, type
of Forum session, type of content, and many other
parameters.
"This capability enhances
the repertoire of tools that Partners have when
seeking
advice or researching new products and companies,"
said Managing Partner Jack Phillips. "For
example, a product search would return all the
pros, cons
and comments
made by current customers of a particular solution
provider, from all of our recent
Forums."
The
Partner Portal is
available exclusively
to Institute Partners.
To learn more, please
contact Phil Gardner at 617.399.8100
or direct an email
to partner@ianetsec.com.
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