Symantec's harsh warning

If there were any fans of doom scenarios at Symantec CEO John Thompson's keynote at the RSA Conference here in San Jose, they had plenty to rejoice about.

The security CEO got to address the crowds at RSA Conference this morning following a rather uneventful speech by Verisign's chief executive who as his "one more thing" (copying Steve Jobs trademark keynote technique) gimmick announced that he will be supporting Microsoft's Infocards that Bill Gates spoke about yesterday. If that's the "one more thing", you know the rest of the presentation was hardly any more interesting.

But back to Thompson. He sent a strong warning to the "business leaders" of the world that consumers are starting to lose their patience with the state of online insecurity.

The continuing barrage of online attacks is eroding the online trust. So in addition to stopping the actual attacks, there is a task to win back that trust, Thompson said.

While he spent most of his time underscoring the ever sliding scale on which online security is measured, he did have a few suggestions.

Search engines for instance should add user ratings, allowing the public to grade websites for their trustworthiness. This way a user can easily distinguish a fraudulent website from a genuine e-commerce store.

Google is already doing this in its Google's price comparison beta Froogle by the way, but it wouldn't hurt to print those ratings in the regular results as well.

John Thompson

Tags: symantec, john thompson, rsa 2006, RSA conference, security