Firms spent $5.5 billion on firewalls, virus scanners, and biometric ID checkers last year, but one vital business asset remains woefully hackable: employees. "Humans are the weakest link in the security chain," says Sharon Conheady, director of the U.K.'s First Defense Information Security, who'll teach corporate geeks at this summit how to deflect "social engineering" swindles. These low-tech, highly effective scams take advantage of people's naturally trusting (read: gullible) behavior to access sensitive data. So a trickster might call an employee pretending to be an IT engineer and ask for passwords and user names, or befriend smokers outside a building and follow them to their offices. The take-home message? The paranoiacs (see November 6) are right: Never talk to strangers. -- TB

tue, november 17
Hack
Deepsec In-Depth Security Conference
Vienna, Austria

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