SecurityByte: India’s largest security conference
Nishchal Bhalla is the founder of SecurityByte Conference as well as security companies SD Elements and Security Compass. In this interview, he introduces India’s largest information security event and provides insight into what attendees can expect at this year’s edition.
Introduce the SecurityByte Conference 2011 to our readers.
SecurityByte 2011 is the India’s largest security conference being held in Bangalore, India from September 6th – 9th. The conference has a total of 38 speakers and panelists with both national and international recognized names.
Where do you see SecurityByte Conference 2011 fit in the world of IT security?
SecurityByte is already one of Asia’s larger IT security conferences with attendees from middle-east to far east and Australia to Canada. What makes SecurityByte unique and global is that it is targeting many roles on organization from developers, administrators, to hard core security professionals. From CXOs, managers all the way to university students.
The idea is not only to share between each level but to understand some of the challenges each role has with the other. Much like any other conference, SecurityByte also has a CTF and exhibition area for vendors to connect with all these people so that not only can they hire people but also showcase and sell their products and services. This opportunity is very unique in India as no other IT Security Conference is present in India at the same large scale.
India is one of the only nations where there is such a large English speaking developer base. This has lead many multi-nationals to open development centers across India. Software that is being used by anyone in this world is in someway or form is either developed, tested or consumed in India too.
Having a conference like SecurityByte also allows these developers, testers, administrators and managers who are buying this product to have a broader understanding of some of the problems that exists in today’s market place and how to improve on development skills and standards to make a more secure product.
For India this is one of the only places to network with both national and internationally recognized IT security professionals at such a large scale.
SecurityByte is bringing people from management, decision makers, hackers to newbie by providing them one platform to meet each other by organizing an event covering “The Conference”, “The Leadership Summit”, “War Games”, “Workshops”. SecurityByte is the only event in India which is giving an opportunity for knowledge sharing from multiple continents. This event also targets developers by talking about developer related topics.
How will this year’s event differ from the last event?
This year the conference has opened its doors for public participation of the CTF, the keynotes and the exhibition area. Additionally, there are 10 training sessions that are going to be available. There is a wireless CTF and a web hacking ctf. The pre-CTF qualification round has already found more than 50 attendees coming to the event just for the CTF session. The CXO event is also much larger and is slated to have about 200 decision makers at the event. The event is not only growing in size but awareness too.
What topics will your speakers focus on? What’s “hot” this year?
Some of the hot topics seen in India are “Mobile Security”, “Web Hacking”, ” Wireless Security” and “Social Networking” . Of course our speakers will be covering security threats on HTML5, WiFi worms, social networks, mobile threats, botnets, etc.
This year for the leaders our primary focus is social networking. A panel discussion with people like Mr. Shouvick Mukherjee, CEO India, Yahoo! , Mr. S. Prabhu, IAAS, CISA, Principal Account General Karnataka , Mr. Wong Loke Yeow, Evangelist, ArcSight & Mr. Sridhar Jayanthi, CEO India, McAfee Inc with the primary theme being “Be Secure or Be Social” will be discussed in our India Leadership Summit 2011.
What have been the major security threats in 2011 so far, and how have these informed the conference agenda this year?
The major threats seen in India have been focused around social networking, search engine poisoning, banking frauds and fake antivirus targeting large MNCs and government organizations. With over 25 million users of mobile devices in India, the largest threat vector is mobile devices.
SecurityByte will not only have talks and classes on mobile security but will also have a panel discussion around mobile security. To top it off, mobile device application developers don’t go through the same stringent rules as one would hope. A 10 year old kid sitting in his basement might design a simple applications that could be riddled with security issues which could bring down a large number of cell phones.