Florian Egloff gives Keynote Address at FIRST Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico
On 14 June 2017 Florian Egloff, a DPhil Candidate in Cyber Security and Research Affiliate of the Cyber Studies Programme at Oxford University’s Centre for Technology and Global Affairs, delivered a keynote address at the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The title of his speech was “Cybersecurity and the Age of Privateering”. Drawing from his doctoral research, Egloff discussed historical analogies of piracy and privateering to make sense of developments in cybersecurity that have traditionally – but misguidedly – been seen as entirely new phenomena. The speech compared cyber hackers to privateers and modern technological giants such as Google to the large merchant shipping companies of the seventeenth century.
As Egloff pointed out, this comparison is useful in understanding not only the nature of security trends in our times, but also possible responses to them. “In those days, there wasn’t a clear definition of what was considered piracy in the high seas,” he stated. “There needed to be a clear definition of what constituted piracy, what was legal and what was not.” Similar problems of concepts and law confront cybersecurity planning today.
Read more information and a summary of the speech
