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BlackHat Las Vegas has officially started. Jeff Moss kicked the conference off with the usual boring stuff. One of the surprises is that BlackHat Amsterdam will not happen. Instead they decided to move the event to Barcelona because they could not find a facility in Amsterdam big enough anymore. As a result BlackHat Barcelona will be bigger it feature three parallel tracks in stead of the two tracks that where possible in Amsterdam. Still I am sad that they abandoned my home country.

Then the keynote by Douglass Merill started.

Now being a CEO and having been a security guy before he talks about the way we work changed over time.

First of all he talks about what has caused the IT security budgets to rise where technology budgets in general have decrease. Security guys have learned how to speak executive. CEO’s listen to the Security guys and are scared of them. Unfortunately the executive speak from security guys comes with falsisms. False ROI calculations based on missed loss in stead of gain and technology push based on compliance requirement are just a few.

But the world is not the place we learned to know and love. Work and private life are getting more and more intertwined. And people are using consumer technology in stead of enterprise software, because consumer technology is currently better then enterprise technology.

This has cause classic paradigms like “hard shell soft center” (a.k.a. perimeter security) to fail. Security needs to transform from being a preventative technology and listen to users. If you make it easy for users/developers to use security they will start to use it, “humans are like rats, if you show then the easy way through the maze they will take it”.