Show Takes on the Unexpected

In a disaster, is your data as well as your hardware insured? The cost of replacing the hardware could just be a drop in the bucket compared with what the data itself is worth.

Security managers and representatives from top network security vendors discussed this and other legal, political and management issues at the NetSec conference last month. I was impressed that sessions ranged from technical tutorials to forward-looking seminars on the impact recent legal decisions will have on insurance coverage for networks.

The tutorials covered important topics such as firewall hardening and forensics for tracking hackers. Two-day seminars covered such topics as incidence response systems and how to implement PKI.

Although the show floor was small compared with those at goliath shows such as N+I and Comdex, it had an interesting mix of established players such as PKI giant VeriSign and intrusion detection system vendors such as NFR.

NetSec is sponsored by the Computer Security Institute.