TORONTO. For the last 35 years, Star Wars has been the cornerstone of mainstream and geek cultural awareness. While Star Wars is a piece of dramatic fiction, many have found inspiration and solace in it that can apply to everyday real world. According to Kellman Meghu, Head of Security Engineering for Check Point Technologies, Star Wars isn’t just entertainment; it’s also a case study in data security.
Meghu was the lunchtime keynote speaker at the SecTor security conference, where he stepped outside the box of Star Wars fanboy to give a new security opinion on George Lucas’s Star Wars: A New Hope.
As a security professional, speaking to an audience of security professionals, terms like CSO (Chief Security Officer), APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) are well known. Those terms are not typically part of the Star Wars lexicon. Meghu’s talk was officially titled, ‘ How Not to Do Security: Lessons Learned from the Galactic Empire’ and it was riddled with modern IT security acronyms, terms and analysis.
While on the surface, Star Wars appears to be a film about the battle of good vs. evil, Meghu framed the movie as response to a data loss incident. The Empire, lost sensitive data that details industrial secrets about its new technology (The Death Star) and that’s where Meghu’s analysis begins. He sees Darth Vader as being the CSO of the Galactic Empire. In a typical enterprise network, it would fall on the CSO to assemble the security team after a data loss incident.
Using clips from the film, Meghu showed the response (the first scene when an Imperial Star Destroyer boards Princess Leia’s consular ship). Rather than viewing that as boarding exercise, Meghu noted that the CSO had traced the data down.
Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:
What Star Wars Teaches Us About BYOD and IT Security
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.