Infosecurity Europe is the continent's premier dedicated information security event. InfoSec, held the 22nd-24th of April at London's Grand Hall, Olympia, saw some 300 security vendors exhibiting and more than 12,500 security folks visiting. Next year will be at the bigger Earls Court. Last year had fewer attendees, but the benefit of a clear key topic: data security.

So, what was the buzz about this time around? Well, for starters there was no single topic that stood out, but instead InfoSec 2008 was a complex smorgasbord of all past and present security and risk management themes. Certainly, deperimeterization, endpoint protection, data-driven security, and compliance strategies were very visible, but at the same time many network security solutions and antivirus stuff were pushed heavily. Some of the traditional security heavyweights were, you guessed it, widely visible and audible and included the likes of McAfee, Sophos, Kaspersky, Juniper Networks, etc.

For those who didn’t know, the Formula One racing series has recently started in Australia and Asia. While high-speed enthusiasts in the US flock to NASCAR or the IndyCar series, the rest of the world is hooked on the F1 racing circus (kind of similar to the situation with football/soccer…).

Anyway, as a security professional you have probably heard of last year’s massive data theft involving several high profile Formula One teams like Ferrari, McLaren, and Renault. What you might have not heard is how the technical data got stolen: Well, in the ultra sophisticated and technologically advanced world of Formula One racing, design plans and test results were simply copied to a bunch of floppy disks. Yes, floppy disks - those early versions of portable media devices that never really made it into the new millennium!