Published: November 16, 2011

From Bad Boy Hacker to Founder and CTO of Silicon Valley "hot start-up" Palo Alto Networks - Nir Zuk Launches NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

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PHUKET, Thailand - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Today's opening keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit introduced the founder and CTO of one of this year's most talked-about Silicon Valley start-ups.

CTO of Palo Alto Networks Nir Zuk's keynote speech, entitled Creative innovation on the right side of the law, highlighted the complexity of the IT security problems facing enterprises today. He explained how hackers were becoming highly professional, financially motivated, and are able easily to penetrate the perimeter defences of the corporation.

"It takes just five steps," said Zuk, as he detailed the way that hackers target individual employees using social media, and persuade them to open a back door into the enterprise network by downloading an infected document that appears to contain information about one of their hobbies or interests.

Zuk said that it takes security companies two months to respond to such attacks because they are not widespread but highly targeted.

"If it only happens once, security vendors will not find it," Zuk said. "And even then it can take a week or more to fix. Every executable is a suspect, and there aren't enough security researchers in the world to fix all the vulnerabilities."

Zuk said that his company's firewall technology fixes the problem because it looks at all documents and executables in a virtual machine and watches for malware-like behaviour. "We do it in software in a datacentre and generate signatures for each piece of malware," Zuk said. "We can then block it within an hour."

Zuk created some of the first computer viruses before going straight and laying the foundations for stateful inspection, a technique now used by all firewalls, and intruder prevention systems, which offer inline protection for enterprise networks.

Following the opening plenary sessions, an audience including press and analysts representing more than 70 publications in 15 countries across the Asia Pacific region participated in a series of briefings with top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and many others.

Nir Zuk's presentations together with transcripts and photos of the first day's sessions are available from the following links (content available within 24 hours):

Keynote Presentation - Nir Zuk

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Keynote-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Keynote-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/image.php?image=Thailand2011-Nir-Zuk-Palo-Alto.JPG

http://www.netevents.org/image.php?image=Thailand2011-Nir-Zuk-Manek-Dubash.JPG

Defending the Enterprise from the latest generation of Cyberattacks chaired by IDC - Sourcefire, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-DebateI-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-DebateI-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/image.php?image=Thailand2011-DebateI-Tim-Dillon-IDC.JPG

http://www.netevents.org/image.php?image=Thailand2011-DebateI-Panellists-Eric-Chan-Fortinet-Mike-Haro-Palo-Alto-Leon-Ward-Sourcefire.JPG

Presentation by: Paul Sumner, Analysys Mason

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Presentation-presentation.pdf