Wilmington University hosts Quarterly Meeting of ISSA

2016/06/08

The Delaware Valley Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) held its quarterly meeting on June 3rd at Wilmington University’s New Castle campus. This free event was open to all, and included a full agenda of talks focused on hot topics in cloud security, health care security, ransomware, data breaches, and a Capture-the-Flag competition hosted by Maven Security.

Just a few years ago, the concept of “moving to the cloud” was a hot new topic; now it is a hot new security issue. Who owns your data? In what part of the world is it being stored? How can you be sure your vendor is keeping it safe? Elayne Starkey, Chief Information Security Officer for the State of Delaware, described best practices developed by the State for working with cloud vendors.

The strength of the cloud is the ability to dynamically add resources during crunch time. Customers typically only pay for what they use. However, Alicia Leone of Radware cautioned that this can work against an organization during a denial of service (DoS) attack. As an organization gets flooded with attacker traffic, cloud services expand to handle the volume at the organization’s expense.

A panel of health care system CISO’s (Chief Information Security Officers) addressed several security issues including third party vendors whose devices are attached to hospital networks, and how each organization deals with ransomware.

Ron Stamboly of Gemalto presented on the topic of “Securing the Breach.” A birds-of-a-feather session and Capture the Flag competition completed the day.

What an excellent networking opportunity for CNS and MSIST/IA students! This is a great venue for getting familiar with various cybersecurity businesses based in the area, and to find out who is hiring, what kinds of positions need to be filled and what’s involved in the day-to-day life of a cybersecurity professional.

For Dr. Hufe it was a great opportunity to meet with cybersecurity content matter experts–also known as future adjunct instructors! Several ISSA attendees inquired about the CNS and MSIST/IA programs to help further their careers.

The overall focus of the ISSA organization aligns extremely well with Wilmington University’s undergraduate and graduate cybersecurity programs. The University looks forward to hosting future meetings of the Delaware Valley Chapter of ISSA. Hopefully a field trip can be organized for one of the chapter’s upcoming Philadelphia meetings.