Cyber Expo & Conference Ireland: demystifying cybersecurity and mitigating business risk

Taking place on April 28, 2022 in the Leopardstown Pavilion, the Cyber Expo & Conference Ireland event will continue its goal of demystifying cybersecurity and keeping organisations up to date on trends and developments in the global marketplace.

While the Expo will host circa 30 IT Security Software Vendors and 20 IT Service providers scheduled to exhibit, we wanted to take a quick deep dive over the next few weeks at the various business stream breakout sessions taking place and who you can expect to hear from on the day.

Kicking the conference off this year will be our keynote speaker Paul C Dwyer. Recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on cyber security, risk and privacy, chief executive of Cyber Risk International, and president of the ICTTF International Cyber Threat Task Force, Paul specialises in corporate and enterprise security, development of cyber defence programmes, and business operations protection for organisations and will set the scene for the detailed business streams throughout the day.

There should be something for everyone here as the sessions are varied to cover most of the challenges industry is facing, protecting against cyber attacks and minimising compliance risks.

One of the early sessions is the ‘Always On’ stream. As computing becomes more sophisticated, Always-On systems have started to replace older on-demand systems that functioned on different types of resources. Always-On systems are continuously available, plugged in or connected to power sources and networks. They continue to hum along throughout the day and night, offering more simple, smart and fast application experiences.

Facilitated by Sean Reynolds, chief executive of Rits Information Security, we will hear from industry leaders Awingu (work from home, secure BYOD, secure VPN, Citrix alternative), Bullwall (last line of defence against ransomware), Kemp (load balancing, network performance monitoring, and network detection and response to ensure applications are always-on) and Zyxel technologies (security solutions & network management) as they cover how you can make your IT infrastructure available around the clock, and more resilient to cyberattacks.

Another business stream, facilitated by Alex Burnham, director IT audit and security at Mazars Ireland, is ‘Business Email Compromise’. When it comes to email, the name of the game is verification and authentication. As company inboxes are the target for phishing attacks and the like, it’s an area that costs significant amounts of money annually for unlucky companies.

Said attacks are nothing new, but the social engineering behind it is getting smarter and businesses do get caught out. All companies are likely to have experienced being targeted or attacked in some form, said Michael Conway, director of Renaissance, and one way vendors are helping protect them is by looking at things in reverse. A big focus for companies is Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), an email authentication, policy and reporting tool which helps protect organisations from email fraud.

In short, it’s a way for someone to protect their domain from unauthorised use and give people confidence that only real emails come through.

By using existing authentication techniques like DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), it offers instructions on what to do if a mail doesn’t pass either of those authentication methods, like send it to the spam folder or reject it entirely.

The vendors involved in this business stream discussion, Hornetsecurity and Redsift, handle this in different ways.

For example, Redsift offers a product called OnINBOX which gives users a colour-coded system to tell them if an email is good or suspicious. The RAG method is a straightforward way to alert someone if an email isn't what it seems to be; and Hornetsecurity flagship product, 365 Total Protection has been specially developed for Microsoft 365 and offers comprehensive protection for Microsoft cloud services – further enhanced by its two recent acquisitions in the space, Altaro and Zerospam.

“They are all playing in this area in their own way,” said Conway. “What they’re trying to do is give email recipients and senders confidence that they can trust the email that’s coming in.”

The Cyber Expo & Conference Ireland will be held at the Leopardstown Pavilion, Dublin on Thursday April 28 from 8am-4pm. To register, visit cyboexpoireland.ie