The Baltic Cyber Security Forum 2019 held in Vilnius, Lithuania attracted more than 500 attendees from different Lithuanian organizations to discuss the current topics, trends and solutions in the cyber security field.
Walking through the main entrance, all those rainy thoughts were gone. Your mind focused on the agenda and you feel excitement for the conference tracks you could attend after the keynote session. The layout of the conference was standard – main keynote session and three parallel sessions after the main break. The expo zone featured 20+ stands where you could grab a coffee or a souvenir from the partner stands, but more importantly have a great conversation with other participants in the conference.
Briding The Gap
The slogan of this year’s conference was “The best day to meet cyber security community” and anyone who has attended will probably agree with it. You could see conference attendees just spending time talking to each other and discussing things that drive their professional life at the moment. The organizers’ goal for the conference was to increase the level of cyber security awareness in the surrounding community.
As a result, the event was filled with different levels of content and it is easy to choose between the tracks depending on your level of immersion in the security field. It was nice to see that, in addition to field professionals, some young faces from local universities were attending to get some up to date knowledge.
Keynotes of the conference reflected topics that cyber security professionals deal with, on a daily basis. The presenters also put a lot of attention to share upcoming and even projected trends that they see appearing in the near future.
Topics discussed ranged from usual cyber security landscape issues, such as prevention of attacks and vulnerabilities encountered every day to transformation of businesses and supporting processes in light of increasing level of automation by leveraging of IoT devices, AI and machine learning resulting in changes in how the digital economy is nowadays influencing the daily lifestyle of a human being – which altogether shifts some of the paradigms cyber security is currently based on.
A Glimpse Into The Future
SEC Consult contributed to the event with a keynote speech of Ulrich Fleck, our global Chief Revenue Officer. In his talk “What will drive the Cyber Security Business in 2020?”, Fleck presented some of the research findings from the SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab which eventually turned into real life examples of insecure IoT devices.
He also covered the important topic of how cyber security is becoming continuous in a much earlier stage of product lifecycle than before. Essentially, security should be ensured by integrating early in the process of technology or product development. A third driver of Cyber Security Business for 2020 will be the missing talent. With growing demand for making technology secure, the talent gap will be one of the reasons to hinder the cyber security economy from growing.
Another highlight from the conference, was an on-stage discussion about something that was widely covered in the Lithuanian media field: Scams that recently happened and technical vulnerabilities in e-government systems which were fixed in a non-timely manner (only after they got public attention).
Artificial Intelligence meets Cyber Security
Later on, the audience split into three parallel sessions, where the participants could dig deeper in different cyber security topics, such as real time risk measurement, AI driver security, targeted supply chain attacks, future of authentication, GDPR and many more. Contentwise, the conference was rich, providing many flavours of topics and presenters, so anyone attending could pick what is most interesting or just hang out in the expo zone having a cup of coffee.
The Baltic Cyber Security Forum 2019 brought together a wide audience from different fields. IT and cyber security representatives exchanged their knowledge, engaged in discussions during the coffee breaks and contributed to a marvellous event experience. Overall, May 29th was really the best day to meet cyber security community in Vilnius. See you next year!