Deke George
Deke George, a co-founder of NetSPI, is a business-oriented IT executive. He has significant entrepreneurial experience as both a member and founder of multiple startups. He began his career as a founder of the computer forensics program at Ontrack (now Kroll-Ontrack). In this capacity, he has worked on high-profile computer fraud and computer evidence cases in the United States and abroad. As an entrepreneur with a focus on creating client oriented solutions, Deke has been involved in a variety of roles including consultant, sales, and leadership for a number of technology based organizations. Deke holds a B.A. in Physics from Middlebury College in Vermont.
August 10th, 2011
Reflections on Black Hat 2011
There were a number of very good presentations this year and the after-hours parties were great, but from a security industry standpoint, Black Hat 2011 seemed like it had less energy this year. Some of that might have been because it got so much airplay on commercial media and NPR before and during the event, […]
July 20th, 2011
The value of multi-layer / comprehensive pen testing
For the past five years it seems like almost everything in information security has focused on application security and, for the NetSPI consulting practices, our application security business (app pen testing, code review, etc.) has significantly increased. In that time, we have seen areas like network and systems vulnerability assessments change due to the commoditization of […]
May 20th, 2011
Thoughts on NetSPIs 10-year anniversary
We celebrated NetSPI’s 10 year anniversary last month. It’s amazing that it has been that long. The anniversary has led me to reflect on NetSPI’s history and on the security industry’s history (at least since I’ve been involved – so, from around 1995). Being on the forensics team at Ontrack in the mid 1990’s, we […]
March 2nd, 2011
Counseling the Corporate Board
There was a great quote in a recent Ponemon study sponsored by Cenzic and Barracuda: “Most organizations have been hacked, yet 88 percent still spend more on coffee than on app security.” Combined with the recent revelation that oil companies and components of our national infrastructure have been compromised (see McAfee’s Global Energy Cyberattacks: “Night […]
June 14th, 2010
Is PCI driving the development of information security within healthcare?
I like to watch industries evolve in how they deal with information security. It was interesting to watch retail evolve as PCI got more organized. The PCI Council put together the DSS with dates and penalties for breaches and non-compliance, and that drove significant change. It appears that a similar major change within healthcare is […]
May 21st, 2010
Secure360
We held the Secure360 conference in the Twin Cities last week. Presentation topics included PCI, cloud computing, and problems within the security industry. While it can get tiring discussing the industry’s problems, I like trying to understand the difficult nature of information security and enjoy the challenge of trying to overcome the obstacles related to rationally […]
April 2nd, 2010
Risk, Security and Subjectivity Within PCI
In late March Thales released an interesting report on the state of PCI – “PCI DSS Trends 2010: QSA Insights Report.” The report was written by the Ponemon Institute and it highlights the difficulty of taking into account risk, security and subjectivity within the PCI DSS compliance standard. If you haven’t read it, here’s a […]
March 10th, 2010
Observations from HIMSS
I was at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) national conference last week in Atlanta. Overall, the conference wasn’t much different than past years. From an information security perspective the presentations and conversations were limited, but there were a number of interesting things that I took away from the conference. First and foremost, […]
November 3rd, 2009
PCI in Europe Today
I attended the 2009 PCI Community meeting in Europe last week. Since this was a feedback year, there wasn’t a significant amount of new content; however, there were some interesting points regarding PCI adoption in Europe. It’s been discussed quite frequently that the Europeans are behind North America in implementing PCI, especially at the merchant […]