Suspicious Minds In The Post-Snowden World

Security experts today confirmed some in the channel community's worst fears: post-Snowden, organizations are locking down their IT, treating cloud services with distrust, and even avoiding investing in new technologies as a result of security and privacy issues.

In a delegate roundtable at Black Hat Europe 2014 this morning, called Defense Post-Snowden and led by Black Hat and Defcon founder Jeff Moss, security professionals working for a range of European and international organizations confirmed that their protection, prevention and mitigation strategies have become more conservative since the Snowden data leaks.

Yes," said one industry attendee. "We trusted our internal connectivity more [even though] the internet was the Wild West. Now, we're treating internal connectivity as suspect as well and we have increased our monitoring activities."

Most delegates agreed that their organizations are taking more interest in data and information security since Snowden's revelations about global National Security Agency and GCHQ surveillance - with some of the focus coming increasingly from the C-suite executives that had previously remained out of technical security discussions.

For several, though, the result had been "a step back and away" from cloud computing and SaaS solutions in all their various forms, as the security that organizations desire is either difficult to deliver or simply too costly. And that meant a step back from the idea of having the "latest and greatest" technology, in many cases, they said.

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