From November 17th to 19th, the 22nd EICAR Conference was held at the Leibnitz University in Hanover (Germany), the home of the well known Institute for Legal Informatics. For the last 22 years, the EICAR Conference has gained a solid reputation in the IT security world. This year, the EICAR conference aimed to combine the areas data protection and IT security.
The development of these areas went more or less independent from each other. However, security experts have agreed upon their connectivity. It was possibly the first time that the topics data protection and security were addressed in a combined approach and not as completely isolated topics. Due to the close cooperation with the Leibnitz University Hanover, a first step has been made and it could lead to questions about these areas in some organizations, companies and during upcoming new EICAR meetings.
Captivating speeches by Peter Kruse (CSIS, Denmark) on “Tinba” and Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgo (Leibnitz University Hanover) about data protection and privacy contented the audience. Very remarkable were the ad-hoc presentations given by Righard Zwienenberg. One of these lectures was a short memorial speech dedicated to Peter Szor, a worldwide well known IT researcher from the security industry, who died suddenly and unexpected, only a few days prior to this conference. He was a regular speaker at the early EICAR conferences.
As lectures and speeches proceeded, it appeared that “data privacy” was possibly the most used term during the whole conference. During the past two decades, the word ‘privacy’ was rarely mentioned in any speech during security conferences, but it now seems to be part of nearly every presentation, the technical and the scientific ones.
The AV industry has to regard “data privacy” as a rather new approach which has not been present before, or, has not been in focus. It constitutes a new task for all entities involved and therefore also for the AV industry, its protection products and technologies. Nowadays, the availability of data is a requirement in almost all areas and at all time, anywhere. It is essential to protect this data in every stage.
Until we reach a worldwide recognition and agreement in laws about data privacy we will stumble upon a lot of more contradiction and problems related to privacy. This is one of the big challenges for the upcoming years. Theoretically, it could be handled, with improved international laws and optimized programming, but still, a lot of work needs to be done. Big data is a good example of this and it is already becoming a solution and a problem in itself.
Prof. Dr. Paul Langemeyer honored the attendees with his presence during the conference He is one of the co-founders of the EICAR organization, together with me, Eddy Willems, Security Evangelist of G Data. Paul Langemeyer also was the EICAR’s first chairman.
Next Year and beyond
This year’s event was another special one and I’m already looking forward to attending the next one. This next episode will include some very new initiatives from EICAR which should appear soon on the EICAR website. Next year’s conference will be held in October 2014.
