Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Chris Hoff, HacKid.org Leads UNITED Security Summit Award Winners
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Chris Hoff, HacKid.org Leads UNITED Security Summit Award Winners
Awards Recognize Outstanding Contributions to Propel the Information Security Industry Forward to Meet Future Challenges
San Francisco, CA at the UNITED Security Summit – September 20, 2011 – The first annual UNITED Security Summit included
an awards ceremony at the official event party, held at Vessel, San
Francisco last night. The UNITED Security Summit Awards focus on
recognizing the contributions of individuals and organizations that are
propelling the information security industry forward, building the level
of preparedness in the face of the changing threat landscape. Winners
at the ceremony were recognized specifically for innovation,
collaboration, investment in the future or in the industry in general,
and leadership.
“As a co-sponsor of the UNITED Security
Summit awards and participant in the judging process, it’s exciting to
see how innovative and collaborative companies in the security industry
are,” said F. Ward Holloway III, vice president of Business Development,
FireMon. “Recognizing these winners is a big step to fueling the type
of tireless commitment our industry needs in order to grow and help
organizations stay secure.”
The Innovation Award: recognizing
the organization, individual or project that has demonstrated exemplary
innovation in addressing infosec challenges. This winner of this year’s
Innovation Award is:
Cloudflare,
selected for its innovative approach to enhancing the performance and
security of every website on the Internet. CloudFare makes the web
faster and safer for more than 350 million Internet visitors and has
stopped more than a billion attacks directed at its customers’ websites.
The Collaboration Award: honoring an
industry alliance or body, or recognizing a vendor collaboration, or a
number of individuals that have worked together to address an infosec
challenge. The winner of this award is Dave Kennedy,
also known as Rel1k. Kennedy embodies collaboration in the infosec
industry by dedicating countless hours to supporting a number of open
source projects, founding DerbyCon to provide networking opportunities
for infosec professionals, and co-authoring a book and a number of
tools, including the Social Engineer Toolkit, made freely available to
the industry.
The UNITED Bright Light award: recognizing charitable work or an example of dedication above and beyond the norm. The winner of this year’s award was Johnny Long, Hackers for Charity.
Based in Uganda, Hackers for Charity feeds and educates the world’s
most vulnerable citizens through a number of activities related to
information security. The charity provides free IT and security training
to help students learn skills and secure employment, provides technical
assistance to local charities and non-profits, and diverts the profits
from sales of Long’s book, No Tech Hacking, to
provide food for HIV and AIDS sufferers in East Africa. The award was
received by Marcus Carey, who works with Long on a newly founded
charity: Infosec Without Borders.
The Leadership Award: recognizing a CISO/ CSO or security team that has led by shining example this year. This award goes to the security team atZynga. When
it comes to player security, Zynga doesn’t play games. Zynga Security
is a team of many security specialists and spans from application
security engineers, e-crime analysts and security architects to incident
response engineers and forensic analysts. Zynga not only strives to be
an industry leader in security best practices, but also utilizes
“out-of-the-box” approaches to solve complex security challenges. The
team has a strong focus on education and awareness, investing a large
amount of time and effort into explaining the thinking behind security
policies, and making this fun and meaningful for players through
interactive tutorials and videos. Zynga also collaborates closely with
other security teams in the industry. It frequently encourages security
vendors, partners and suppliers to challenge traditional ways of
thinking to be more innovative.
The Brightest Future Award: honoring an
individual or organization that makes the greatest effort or investment
to prepare the security industry for the future (e.g. training,
developing alliances, education program at a school). This award was won
by Chris Hoff, Founder of HacKid Con, an
event established for the belief that children represent the future and
teaching them in a fun and engaging way builds the best foundation for
future success. The HacKid conference provides an interactive, hands-on
experience for kids aged 5-17 and their parents to learn about
technology, gaming, mathematics, safety, privacy, networking, security
and engineering.
“The information security industry must
continue to evolve and innovate to attract the brightest minds, foster
better collaboration, and stay ahead of the challenges that will always
come from the changing threat landscape. This requires leadership and
action from each of us and these awards recognize individuals and
organizations that are already leading by example,” said Sheldon Malm,
senior director of Security Strategy and Alliances of award co-sponsor,
Rapid7. “Ours is still an industry in its infancy, and we hope the
actions of this year’s winners will inspire more innovation, broader
collaboration, and a stronger security community for generations to
come.”
For more information for UNITED Security Summit please visit http://www.unitedsummit.org/.
About UNITED Security Summit
The
UNITED (“Using New Ideas To Empower Defenders”) Security Summit is the
premier venue entirely focused on innovation and collaboration in the
security community. Bringing together security decision makers,
practitioners, commercial vendors, open source projects and academia,
the Summit highlights technologies and approaches to help organizations
better cope with today’s increased security threats. Unlike other
conferences, UNITED’s agenda is based on the anatomy of a breach, and
provides educational and interactive sessions that reflect on the
fundamental security challenges from four perspectives (attacker,
operational leadership, IT leadership and the security community)
through a common lens.
The UNITED Summit, September 19 - 20, 2011
at the Hyatt Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, California, features a
variety of industry experts, including Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics; Chris
Young, VMware vice president and general manager; and HD Moore,
Metasploit chief architect and Rapid7 CSO. For more information please
visit http://www.unitedsummit.org/
This post was written by: Divyu
Divyu is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter
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