Information Security Conference – PakCon Academia 09 held in Karachi

Saturday, Dec 12th 2009

PakCon Academia 09 was held in Jinnah University for Women in Karachi on Dec 12th 2009. PakCon is an Information Security event which takes place in Pakistan every year. This year in 2009, for the first time PakCon was organized for students under the title “PakCon Academia 2009”. The event was hosted by Jinnah University for Women in Karachi and was attended by a large number of students, faculty and information security professionals.

The session started with a Quran recitation, followed by welcome speech by the Vice Chancellor of University, Prof. Dr. Riaz Ahmed Hashmi who thanked the organizers of PakCon to bring the event to Jinnah University. He also emphasized on the importance of Information Security and encouraged the students to benefit from the opportunity to learn from professional speakers.

The President of PakCon, Mr. Faiz Ahmed Shuja than shared the vision of PakCon highlighted various activities that they have been doing to generate awareness about Information Security through this platform.

First presentation was of Mr. Zafar Ul-Islam, Enterprise Technology Strategist, Microsoft Pakistan. Zafar’s topic was “Information Protection in a Connected World”. He briefed the audience on various threats and challenges being faced by the industry and the users; and then drilled down into various aspects of information flow and protection needs. His talk included details about persistent protection through data encryption and information rights management technologies. He also elaborated on the vision and concept of building “End to End Trust in the Computing” and explained how security needs to be incorporated at each layer of infrastructure to provide a platform that ensures information is secured throughout its lifecycle.

Mr. Uzair Hashmi, Deputy Manager Information Security, Karachi Stock Exchange was the next speaker who talked about “Ethical Hacking”. During his presentation Uzair briefed the audience on various aspects of hacking and explained how ethical hacking is different from the typical hacking. He mentioned that ethical hacking’s objective is to assist organizations to assess vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure and fix those proactively before any security breach. Uzair also explained the process of penetration testing.

Followed by Uzair, the next speaker was Mr. Faiz Ahmed Shuja, CEO, Rewterz Technologies. Faiz’s presentation topic was “Blended Threat” and he briefed the audience on how they as security experts conduct penetration testing in an organization using various tools. He shared one scenario where their team used social engineering technique to get access to systems which otherwise were highly secured. His key message was to ensure awareness and social readiness aspect of employees because hackers and attackers exploit humans to gain access to sensitive information.

Last speaker of the event was Dr. Athar Mahboob, from NUST & Ibn Khuldun Systems. His topic was “Career Development in Information Security” and briefed the students on various aspects of career management.

The event concluded with a Panel Q&A where all speakers answered questions from the audience.

In the later part of the day after lunch break two technical workshops were conducted for students to share more details of Information Security techniques.