The 27th Security 2019 international conference took place in Prague on the last day of February. As is tradition, the largest independent event of its kind in the Czech Republic was organized by AEC. A total of 22 talks on the topic of cybersecurity, divided into two parallel – technical and management – sections, were attended by a record number of 670 registered people. The defining feature of this year's event was the wide range of presented topics, that had one thing in common which was a high level of expertise and an emphasis on practical usability.
“There is no place for marketing-business presentations at the Security Conference,” said Tomáš Strýček, the CEO of AEC, adding, “We place emphasis on the practical usability of the contributions; the main goal of our event is a professional standard of the individual talks and maximum benefit for the participants.” According to the head of the organizing company, the conference programme was also built on case studies presented by the customer. “We are not afraid of presenting unsuccessful projects to show the risks and to be able to learn from the mistakes,” Strýček pointed out.
The contributions of nearly 30 security specialists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Austria, England, Israel, Finland and Germany included areas of fundamental principles of a systematic approach to addressing security in development, mobisle application security, or practical demonstrations of so-called ethical hacking. After all, the hacking tools ecosystem used by the American NSA hacker division presented by Lukáš Antala of AEC, the organizing company, was one of the most impressive among this year's presentations as voted by participants.
The talk presented by Jan Tomíšek of Rowan Legal on the topic of cloud security from a lawyer's point of view, including adequate contract setting, was also gripping. Another interesting contribution, this time on the topic of mobile banking runtime protection, was presented by Petr Dvořák, the CEO of Wultra. Dušan Petričko, a delegate from Slovenská spořitelna, presented a highly innovative approach to the question of how to grasp DevOps in terms of security, or rather the question of the possibility of using appropriate tools.
As in the previous year, the conference was attended by the Chairman of the Czech Pirate Party, Ivan Bartoš, this time with the topic of Security Operations Centre in state administration. In his presentation, he dealt with reserves and options for security solutions – state-level SOC, highlighting the issues regarding the alignment of legislative and security requirements. At the same time, he thematized the uncertainties regarding the possible transferability of existing experience between the commercial and public sectors.
Security 2019 also included a number of additional programmes, including panel discussions and workshops, accompanied by the popular test lab. AEC penetration testers were available to the participants, under whose guidance, within the Capture the Flag contest, those interested could test their knowledge in fulfilling the given tasks in the areas of hacking, cracking, cryptanalysis and finding information from open sources. Another accompanying event was the exhibition part of the Expo Hall Conference with stands of individual partners. A new feature of this year's conference was the presentation of the Best Exposition Award received by ESET.
“This year we witnessed another record attendance,” Tomáš Strýček commented on Security 2019. “We are, no doubt, excited to see a lot of interest, but even more than the number of participants we appreciate the growing quality of contributions, their thematic breadth and often the ability to capture further development and direction of individual ICT areas,” concluded AEC's Executive Director.
