OWASP EU Summit 2008 Media Coverage/JN English Version

Portugal is not immune to Internet Attacks

“The medium size countries can be impacted from Internet attacks in two or three years”, advises a IT Security specialist.

“The biggest financial centers are improving their security systems, so it is a natural consequence to see the attacks being performed against medium size countries”, said Dinis Cruz to the Lusa Agency, stating that the threats are away for “only more two or three years” and in this scenario, Portugal is not immune.

Dinis is a board member of the international association “Open Web Application Security Project” (OWASP), and these statements were made during their first international summit, which happened at Albufeira between tuesday and friday with more than one hundred researchers and specialists in the IT Security field. He also said that “more than identifying the threats, the challenge for now is to work in a new security paradigm to lead us to a behavior change”. According to him, is necessary to move forward in a really fast way to “make IT security visible to all of us”.

OWASP is a non-profit international organization founded in the USA and which supports projects developed by researchers from several countries using Open Source applications, a class of software were the code is open to changes and improvements from the community. Created on the 60s at USA, the Open Source paridigm still poses as an option to commercial applications developed by multinationals companies like Microsoft.

The OWASP Summit hosted at Algarve, was planned as a event to “bring the best IT Security specialists” and the “best knowledge” in Open Source application security solutions for the Internet. “On a period where the country is discussing technological knowledge, the Summit made a lot of sense for us, specially because nobody knows what kind of security systems are being used by the Government.”, said Dinis.

According to him, the “application security issue is not being discussed with the required importance” and one of the core objectives for 2009 at OWASP is to “be more pro-active to make the Open Source applications a choice for the decision makers”, no matter if they are private companies or Governments. For this purpose, the OWASP members located in the European Union are being prepared to - in a second phase supported by partnerships with Universities and other entities - submit projects for the community funds at the Quadro Comunitário de Apoio.

Until the end of 2008, the OWASP will publish a summary of the discussions and reports prepared during the Summit. A second editions are being planned for 2009, which will also be hosted in Portugal, said Dinis Cruz.