Eric Pinkerton
Hivint
Eric has been breaking things just to fix them again since he was five, at 20, he spent his summer evenings working the door in a nightclub, and reading tarot cards during the day. He didn’t realise it back then, but nothing could have prepared him better for a career in InfoSec.
Cutting his teeth in the last century working as a technologist for the BBC World Service in London Eric developed a passion for emerging technologies, with a particular bent for security.
Arriving in Australia in 2003 he landed an operational role at Australia’s first IP Telco, Comindico, before moving to Telstra, then Stratsec (acquired by BAE Systems), CSC and Finally Hivint.
He has presented at Cebit, AusCERT and AISA, AusNOG and CrikeyCon he remains a healthy sceptic who is still partial to aluminum millinery, he blogs about privacy, security and the myth of infallibility in humans.
Eric-Pinkerton-Repudamaphobia-at-AusCERT2018
'Repudamaphobia' - An Irrational Fear of Reputational Damage
As a security consultant one of my favourite questions to ask is simply “what keeps you awake at night”? One of the most prevalent responses is reputational damage and yet if I look at many of the recent high profile breaches you will see that the apparent reputational damage amounting from a breach can often appear from the outside at least to be minimal and short-lived, in fact you might even argue that in some cases, having your brand name all over the news can be a positive thing from a brand marketing perspective – Any publicity is good publicity right? Lightning never strikes twice?
In this talk we will look at some recent high profile breaches and attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, we will attempt to determine what damage was actually sustained by these organisations and their apparent resilience to it.
We will ask ourselves if this fear of reputational damage or repudamaphobia as I like to call it is genuinely something we should be losing our sleep over, and if so, are we are doing the right things to insulate ourselves from it.