Thursday, July 24 | 12:15 PM–1:15 PM

Herbert (Hugh) Thompson, Ph.D., Chief Security Strategist, People Security

Legislation, financially driven attackers and high profile breaches have changed the economics of security. As software developers and designers, we need to rethink the motivations of attackers and the new attacker economy given a growing stolen identity information trade and the rise of organized electronic crime. We need to study “hackernomics”, the social science concerned with description and analysis of attacker motivations, economics and business risk. In this presentation Dr. Thompson vividly illustrates the laws of hackernomics and looks at how to think like an attacker. Warning: there will be live exploits; software will be harmed during this presentation!

Dr. Herbert (Hugh) Thompson is Chief Security Strategist at People Security (www.people security.com) and a worldrenown expert on application security. He has co-authored several books on the topic and has written more than 80 academic and industrial publications on security. In 2006 he was named one of the “Top 5 Most Influential Thinkers in IT Security” by SC Magazine and was featured (along with Harri Hursti) in Hacking Democracy, the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary on e-voting vulnerabilities. He currently hosts “The Hugh Thompson Show” on AT&T’s techchannel (techchannel. att.com). The show is taped in front of a live studio audience in New York and features industry luminaries in IT security. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Florida Institute of Technology where he remains on the graduate faculty.