by For me there were two primary take aways from LISA’13. The first is that because of the “internet of things”, the fact that we carry phones with us everywhere, and that data collection and storage costs become much smaller than the costs to sort through data to determine what data to keep; we have ubiquitous data or surveillance of our daily lives. Corporations and governments just sweep up all data instead of doing targeted data acquisition because it is cheaper and easier to do so. In fact they have lots of tricks such as asking for more data than needed on forms, reward cards, etc. to make it easy for us to give them our data.
The second major take away for me is that security has reached the point where we cannot stop the attackers any more. With the ubiquitous data above the attacker has an easy time to social engineer you into installing malware or gaining access to your systems as they can easily gain your trust. Several speakers said that all systems have been hacked, you just do not know about it. So instead you need to mine that massive data stream to detect the signal of the hacker vs the baseline so you can catch them and stop them.