Published: October 03 2007, 11:01 AM | no comments
by Matthew Gardiner

I recently returned from a week in Warsaw, Poland where I presented at, and attended the ISSE/Secure 2007 (Information Security Solutions Europe) conference and reconnected with the city and people with whom I lived some 15 years ago. What is the ISSE/Secure 2007 conference? It bills itself as Europe’s only independent security conference. A primary organizer of the conference is ENISA, which is an offshoot of European Commission (EC) and was formed to advise and assist the EC, member states, and the European business community on network and information security issues and related legislative matters.

What struck me about this conference is that just by looking through some of the topics covered, which included; Identity Management, IT Security and the Law, Internet Crimes, Awareness Raising, and my personal favorite, Web service security (perhaps because I presented in this section), and many more, one quickly gets the sense that this conference really could be anywhere in world. We are all struggling with the same opportunities and challenges brought on by the Internet. From Polish banking regulators, to German computer scientists, American Product Marketing Managers, and many others, we were all there for the single goal of making it possible that the Internet and more particularly ecommerce over the Internet continue to develop and flourish with manageable risks and unbounded opportunities.

In many ways it was very apropos and personally poignant to have this conference in Warsaw, Poland. Once a country that was for nearly 50 years artificially cut off from its rightful place in Europe. Now with modern communication technology and of course the Internet, it is almost impossible to imagine the concept of building a wall to keep your people in and keep them isolated from the rest of the world. Not only is Poland modernizing very quickly relative to when I lived there some 15 years ago, but its scientists, engineers, and lawyers are right in the middle of making positive contributions to the next phase of the Internet’s development through evolved security technologies and legal frameworks.

Closing out this blog, I mentioned that for me personally this was also poignant trip. It was a lot of fun connecting and reminiscing with the family with whom I lived some 15 years ago. In many ways, their development is a microcosm of the country as a whole. For example, when I first lived with them they had a total of zero telephones, now for this family of 5 they have a total of 6 telephones. In addition, while I was explaining to them why I was in Poland, the lady of the house asked my opinion of a strange email that she had recently received apparently from her Polish bank urging her to log-in immediately by clicking the link… So, apparently the phishers are even attacking the Polish banking system and Polish consumers…We certainly are all in this together.