CIO.com goes undercover (sort of) at GrrCon, the Midwest's premier conference on penetration testing and software security, to learn about cloud security, hacking, lock picking and more.

Every year sees an increase in usage of the Internet. Broadband penetration rises. More websites are created. Business grows by sharing information with their partners. This desire to reach the masses and provide goods and service cheaper and faster than their competitors often means trade-offs are made. These trade-offs typically involve trading accessibility for security.

Hack week in Vegas

During the Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas last week, researchers wheeled out their best new attacks on everything from browsers to automobiles, demonstrating ingenuity and diligence in circumventing security efforts or in some cases in exploiting systems that were built without security in mind. Here's a handful of the ones that deserve the most concern.

A sizeable spike in malicious email attachments is just subsiding, but if history is any indicator, several smaller spikes are about to follow that use even more deceptive means than their predecessors.

For two decades, the dominant security model has been location-centric. We instinctively trust insiders and distrust outsiders, so we build security to reflect that: a hard perimeter surrounding a soft inside. The model works best when there's only one connection to the outside, offering a natural choke point for firewall defense.