Computer Security: Security operations at CERN (4/4)

About

Stefan Lueders, PhD, graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and joined CERN in 2002. Being initially developer of a common safety system used in all four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, he gathered expertise in cyber-security issues of control systems. Consequently in 2004, he took over responsibilities in securing CERN's accelerator and infrastructure control systems against cyber-threats. Subsequently, he joined the CERN Computer Security Incident Response Team and is today heading this team as CERN's Computer Security Officer with the mandate to coordinate all aspects of CERN's computer security --- office computing security, computer centre security, GRID computing security and control system security --- whilst taking into account CERN's operational needs. Dr. Lueders has presented on these topics at many different occasions to international bodies, governments, and companies, and published several articles.

With the prevalence of modern information technologies and its increasing integration into our daily live, digital systems become more and more playground for evil people. While in the past, attacks were driven by fame& kudos, nowadays money is the motivating factor. Just the recent months have shown several successful attacks against e.g. Sony, PBS, UNESCO, RSAsecurity, Citibank, and others. Credit card information of hundreds of thousands of people got exposed. Affected companies not only lost their assets and data, also their reputation has suffered. Thus, proper computer security measures are essential. Without question, security must even more become an inherent ingredient when developing, deploying, and operating applications, web sites, and computing services. These lectures shall give an overview of general computer and information security, subsequently focus on the problems of creating secure applications and computer services, highlight the importance of security operations (i.e. prevention, protection,…