At Interop last year I heard David DeWalt President and CEO of McAfee deliver a keynote — he was new on the job and he spent the bulk of his time on the negative stats of security (more malware infections, more data leakage etc etc..)
Fast forward to 2008, DeWalt is back at Interop and his message is still the same (in fact he could well have used much of the exact same presentation since it sure felt that way to me). He rattles off all kinds of stats that portent doom and gloom.
“I’m going to try my best to scare you,” DeWalt said jokingly at the beginning of his session.
Once he finished his canned presentation though DeWalt actually opened up a bit in response to questions from the moderator who asked DeWalt to give Interop attendees some good news.
“Not
everyone is sick, ” DeWalt said. “We have stopped viruses. When was the last time you saw a major
epidemic of viruses?”
So what’s the real message?
Security threats are real and growing, but security technology isn’t necessarily losing ever battle.
