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Art Coviello keynote

Shake it down, shake it down down. The words of the Commodores' song, "Brick House," took on a whole new meaning this morning at RSA where the 8 a.m. keynote kicked off with a dozen singer/dancers changing up the lyrics to “She's a Bot Net.”

The five-minute number, greeted mostly with bleary eyes from the early morning audience, was prelude to a speech on holistic, information-centric security by Art Coviello Jr., president of RSA, the security division of EMC.

“We're in a perfect storm,” said Coviello. Technical innovations, coupled with regulations, more sophisticated attacks and gaps between technology deployed and the knowledge of the users continue to grow larger.

Coviello called for a number of measures, repeating often a term he called “intelligent security,” wherein software makers would use the tools at their disposal to build security into the infrastructure that operates the way people think instead of making people “think like the technology wants them to.”

Ultimately, this would drive a data-centric approach to security down into the infrastructure and, as he says, do away with the separate function of IT security as it becomes part of the infrastructure.

He also urged policy-makers to spend more on education to produce better-trained developers and IT workers, more government spending on security R&D, more federal leadership, and passage of the federal cybercrime bill that passed the House in 2007.

“Let's punish the criminals, not the businesses,” he said of the current regulatory landscape. 



For more coverage of the RSA Conference, visit our special RSA Conference 2008 microsite.It contains news and announcements from the show floor, as well aspodcasts, video and opinion columns from keynote speakers and industryluminaries, like RSA Conference's Sandra Tom La Pedis and Tim Mather,Symantec's John Thompson and Kevin Haley, and IBM's Val Rahmani.


Deb Radcliff

Deb Radcliff was the first investigative reporter to make cyber crime a beat starting in 1996 after researching a best-selling book about Kevin Mitnick called the Fugitive Game. Since then, she has written hundreds of articles for business and trade magazines, won two Neal awards for investigative reporting, and was runner up for a third. She stood up an analyst program for SANS Institute and ran it for 15 years before joining the Cyber Risk Alliance as strategic analyst on the business intelligence unit. And she wrote her first book in a cyber thriller series, “Breaking Backbones: Information is Power,” which is selling well on Amazon and other outlets.

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