[August 30, 2011] Conference focuses on cyber security Tweet Aug 30, 2011 (Montgomery Advertiser - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- At the Air Force Information Technology Conference on Monday, Airman 1st Class Matthew Miyake was armed with a laptop. On a flat-screen monitor, Miyake brought up the webpage for a mock bank, "Hacme Bank." With a few mouse clicks, Miyake showed passersby how a hacker might get customers' information from an ill-prepared site. It was an interesting, if not unsettling, display. The job of Miyake's unit, Application Software Assurance Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base, Gunter Annex, is to teach other programmers within the Air Force how to be more secure, Miyake said. While the IT conference that runs through Wednesday is geared toward the Air Force, there are private industry applications as well. Miyake mentioned the massive security breach earlier this year that compromised more than 100 million user accounts associated with Sony's PlayStation and online entertainment networks. "Our job is to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen within the Air Force," he said. At the conference, about 200 vendors, many of them private contractors, showed off their latest technology. One of them is Telos, a network security company headquartered in Virginia with an office in Montgomery. "A lot of the same tools that are used by financial institutions are used by military operations," said Charisse Stokes, senior director for Telos' southeastern operations. David Wilson, Telos' director of cyber security strategy, said the core objectives of information security are the same whether the customer is DOD, a bank or a personal computer user: Confidentiality, integrity and availability. Telos provides a variety of IT services, including networking, communications and identity management. Security is the common thread, Wilson said. "And the level of security is going to continue to improve," he said. While private industry uses a lot of the same technology that the Air Force does, the consequences are different, said staff sergeant Terel Hayes, also of the ASACoE. "For companies, (poor cyber security) is a business risk," Hayes said. "For the military, lives are on the line." ___ (c)2011 the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.) Visit the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.) at www.montgomeryadvertiser.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]