Infosecurity and Storage Seminar

For 2 days I went to the Infosecurity and Storage Seminar in the Expo in Brussels. They even arranged a shuttle that brought me from the station to the event. As I check in with my card, I started discovering the seminar.

First of all there were a lot of booths of all the different companies. Each had there own promo material and tried to catch your eye with there demos, competitions and readings. I first wandered around and at almost every booth a salesman started to talk to me about his products or services. This was very handy to know all the players in the market. I also saw how the competition is promoting their products and how they communicate trough there demos, flash movies and presentations. This was very interesting for me to see.

In the late morning, the first presentations where starting. I first went to the live hacking session of Belgacom. Here they exposed the security threads in e-banking with SQL injections. With this I realized that my own e-shops might not be as secure as I thought. There was also a presentation of Safeboot about protecting the identity. They talked about eID, what was very interesting for my thesis and my eID project inside IBM. They showed some possibilities and threads that you have to take into account when working with eID.

In the afternoon, there was the presentation of SecurIT, a business partner of IBM. They had a whole presentation about eID, which was very relevant for me to get more technical and theoretical information. The last one I went to was the presentation about securing the mobile devices. This could also be done with an eID, but they didn't talk much about that possibility. They mostly explained the thread and created awareness of the problem. I also saw a piece of IT security, but that wasn't very relevant.

The next day I went again, because I surely wanted to hear about the VOIP solutions.
In the morning I went back the live hacking sessions, hoping that it would be different then the day before. It was slightly different and he showed some other threads and methods, but the idea stayed the same. During the morning I went to presentations which had not much to do with what I was interested in. But in the late afternoon the session of VoIP started. I always wanted to know how VoIP could be implemented into a company or personal use, and what the dangers could be. It learned that there are still many downsides of VoIP that battle against the big advantage of being cheaper.

I also had some talks with different companies and looked at how all the companies are showing there booths and demo material.

It was a very interesting seminar, too bad I didn't won any prizes (there was a PSP, a fingerprint USB and iPOD's to win) but I'm satisfied with what I saw. It's only a shame that not very much people attend this seminar. What a waste of space.