The seminar features M&T Bank Corporation's Corporate Information Security Officer (CISO) and 2009 Northeast Information Security Executive of the Year, John Walp, along with database security experts from Guardium, including Ron Ben Natan, Ph.D., IBM GOLD Consultant and Guardium CTO. The seminar will be held on Thursday, November 19, 2009 from 9:00 am -- 11:30 am at The Westin Harbour Castle, Toronto.

A recent data breach study by Verizon Business Services reveals that attacks targeting database servers accounted for 75% of all records compromised during 2008 -- compared to other IT assets such as laptops and backup tapes, which account for less than 0.05% of breached data -- with payment card data representing 98% of all compromised records. Database threats, both external and internal, are clearly on the rise; according to IBM, SQL injection attacks continued to increase in 2009, growing 50% in Q1 and nearly doubling in Q2 compared to previous quarters.

Protecting against cyberattacks, breaches, fraud and insider threats has heightened the need for banks, insurers, utilities, global manufacturers, other large enterprises and service providers to carefully review their security and governance programs in order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of their most vital information assets.

Organizations are also seeking to reduce compliance costs and complexity by automating and centralizing controls for key regulations and industry standards such as PCI-DSS, SOX, Canadian Privacy Act (PIPEDA), IT Governance and SAS 70 auditing and reporting requirements.

The seminar will feature the following thought leaders in data security, privacy and compliance:

John Walp, CISSP, CISM, Corporate Information Security Officer for M&T Bank Corporation, 2009 Northeast Information Security Executive of the Year, will discuss the people, process and technology challenges involved with implementing data-level security in a large financial services organization. He will also describe how M&T has implemented Guardium's scalable enterprise platform to secure its critical database infrastructure, while reducing costs and complexity by automating and centralizing controls across multiple DBMS platforms and data centers.