GovernmentWare 09 Seminar (30 Sep - 2 Oct 2009)

From 30 Sept to 2 Oct 2009, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) Singapore presented the GovernmentWare 09 seminar, in conjunction with Civil Service College (CSC) and Image Engine. This 3-day conference was aimed at raising the awareness of the latest ICT security threats, technologies, initiatives and best practices across the public and private sectors, and it has gained recognition as the local leading forum for ICT security. The conference began with an opening address by Mr. K Shanmugam, Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs.

The theme for this year’s conference was “Beyond Uncertainty: Collaborating for Security” which urges all players in the infocomm ecosystem to take a forward-looking stance to share idea and build synergies in today’s increasingly networked world. With increasing outsourcing and reliance on private sector infrastructure and solutions, collaboration between the public and private sector will be important to ensure a high level of IT security capabilities.

A highlight for this year’s conference was the exclusive by-invitation only CXO Track workshop held on the 30th Sept 2009 with introduction by Dr. Liew Beng Keat, Assistant Director (Academic), School of Information and Communications Technology, This workshop was chaired by Tan Shong Ye from PriceWaterhouse Coopers, together with RP staff from the School of Information and Communications Technology. There were 2 presentations, one by Shong Ye and the other by invited speaker, Harriet Pearson from IBM. The SIT staff involved in conducting the hacking demo and hands-on session were William Kwok, David Leong and Ng Tek Ming. Other SIT and MHA staff also assisted the CXOs in the hands-on session.

Invited senior executives from the public and private sectors were updated on the latest security threats such as that of transmission of a worm via a USB thumbdrive, accessing an unattended notebook via LiveUSB drive and the importance of choosing a secure password when using wireless internet as wireless encryption using WPA with a weak password can also be cracked easily.

They also participated in a guided, practical hands-on session that illustrates how easy it is to hack into a victim’s computer and monitor his important transactions through the victim clicking an email attachment which contains an embedded Trojan virus. The session ended with a high level panel Q&A discussion with key industry players in the IT security field providing their valuable insights to the CXOs.

During GovernmentWare 09, one of the RP student’s collaboration project with a company Data Terminator Pte Ltd was presented in the vendors’ exhibition area where the students presented their test results on a security software product marketed by the company.