Enrique SalemPartner, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV)

RSA® Conference 2011 -- Letting Go and Keeping Control: Beyond the PC and Data Center

Name: RSA® Conference 2011 -- Letting Go and Keeping Control: Beyond the PC and Data Center
Uploaded: 2011-04-05T17:45:42+00:00
Duration: 1 min 54 s
Channel: Enrique Salem
Description: In this opening segment of his RSA 2011 keynote, Enrique Salem transports the audience back to July 13, 2010, weaving personal anecdotes about cycling…

5 Apr 2011 · 2 min

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1:54

In this opening segment of his RSA 2011 keynote, Enrique Salem transports the audience back to July 13, 2010, weaving personal anecdotes about cycling, the Rubik’s Cube, and the Gulf oil spill to set a temporal frame. He then pivots to the cyber‑security relevance of that date: the first report of a novel, highly sophisticated malware—later identified as Stuxnet—arriving from an infected computer in Ukraine. Salem highlights the malware’s odd characteristics—a half‑megabyte code size, embedded SCADA strings, and an unusual geographic spread—signaling a targeted, industrial‑control‑system attack. He concludes by noting the immediate, coordinated response taken by the global security community upon this alarming discovery.

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Good morning. This is my third opportunity to be a keynote speaker here at RSA, and I got a little ways to go to catch up to Art, but I'm coming after you, Art. What I want to do is I want to take you back in time a little bit on a visit to a day a little bit in the past. We're gonna go way back to July 13th, 2010. For avid cyclists like myself, it was a day wondering how Lance Armstrong would do in the Tour de France after another vicious crash. For math geeks and puzzle lovers, July 13th was a day celebrating the birthday of Ernő Rubik, the creator of the Rubik's Cube. It was also day 85 of that tragic oil spill in the Gulf. But the biggest story that mattered to most of the people in this room wasn't making headlines or even national news. Yet for the global security community, July 13th would prove to be a very significant day. Because it was on that day that we got the first word from an infected computer in the Ukraine that a new attack was spreading. That attack would soon be known as Stuxnet. At first glance, everything about it was suspicious. How and where it exploited the host, its sheer size— it was a half megabyte of pure code. It contained SCADA strings. It also had a very unusual geographic distribution. So what did we do? We immediately took action.