PICC '12 Keynotes Announced, Early Bird discount ends in 2 days

The 2012 LOPSA PICC conference will be held May 11-12, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The PICC committee announced the closing keynote speaker, Rebecca Mercuri, lead forensic expert at Notable Software, Inc. See the complete schedule on the PICC '12 site.

Dr. Mercuri's talk is called The Black Swan and Information Security: The economic theories proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book 'The Black Swan' have strong parallels in information security. Indeed, the concepts of robustness and risk assessment mentioned in Taleb's writing are also well known to those who design software and systems intended to withstand attack. Such assaults on computers, networks and data are now so commonplace that if these threats all suddenly vanished, this would likely constitute a Black Swan Event. But whether a successful and novel attack should also be considered a Black Swan may be debatable. This talk will compare the shortcomings of bell curve (Mediocristan) and power law (Extremistan) event models. The idea that outlier occurrences should be considered more "normal" will shed insight on new methods for recovery mitigation. Attendees need no formal knowledge of statistics or economics in order to appreciate the concepts discussed in this talk.

Register at: http://picconf.org

Save US$ 125 if you register by March 30.