RSA Conference 2016: The ‘Forsbury Flop’ Perspective

on Thursday, July 21, 2016 at 11:54:46 am

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]During the keynote address at the RSA Conference 2016 in Singapore, RSA President Amit Yoran themed his inspirational speech to the cyber security crowd around PERSPECTIVE.“How everyone looks at the same things differently, that’s perspective. And the same thing goes with Cybersecurity – how we look at cybercrime and cybersolutions affect the action, approaches and outcomes”.

Starting off jokingly, he touched on the hotly debated topic of the US presidency, drawing laughter by sharing, “A recent poll showed that 70% of Americans said they would be anxious if Trump becomes President, while the other 30% said they would become Canadians,” emphasizing that it’s all about Perspective on the level of seriousness the same matter is to folks.

To draw a starting analogy to the annual international IT Conference, Amir centred the theme on the real-life story of US high jumper Dick Fosbury who is attributed for the famous ‘Fosbury Flop’ during the 1968 Summer Olympics.

“Before the 1960s, high jumpers had to land in sawdust-filled pits, on their feet. Soft padded mats were only introduced later, and looking at them – Dick took a new Perspective and decided that he could land on his body and pioneer new jump technique that is now known as the ‘Fosbury flop’ whereby shoulders go over first. This earned him the gold medal in the Olympics and started a whole new generation of high jumpers who saw how successful this could be and copied this new technique. This is how having a new perspective – can change a whole lot of things.”

Amit uses this example of the invention of the ‘Fosbury flop’ and calls on the Cybersecurity community to take a new perspective to Cyber Security.

“Today, business and security are at an inflection point. If we don’t build better strategies to detect and respond to today’s advanced threats we’re going to lose….just like all of those other high jumpers in the ’68 Olympics.

Let’s change this game together. Let’s change our perspective.
Let’s do things differently, just like Dick.
Let’s think beyond the false hope that perimeters, signatures, logging and SIEMs alone will keep us safe.

CSO’s want to understand to what degree security incidents impact business continuity, intellectual property, and damage to their reputation among other things.

Here are the new requirements. We need a perspective that leverages new levels of visibility that can provide certainty around what’s really happening in our environments, not just hunches.

We need the perspective made available from new analytics and detection methodologies. Ones that take advantage of improved visibility and help identify anomalies on the network, in the systems and in user behavior. This gives us the speed to insight so the right actions can be taken.”

“In Cyber Security, Perspective is everything. Our adversaries are beating us NOT because they have a different landing mat. We are using the same tools, but because IT security is at an inflection point and the business world need to address (cyber risk) with a different perspective – otherwise they will lose out like the other Olympic high jumpers who didn’t adopt the Fosbury Flop. Don’t be afraid to make a shift in your PoV (point of view) – Cyber security is much more beyond point products, or perimeter based solutions.”