Hackers, defenders, markets, and angels: investing in cybersecurity.

The Second Annual Cyber Investing Summit met yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. Here are some of the high points; more will follow in the coming days.

The discussions brought to the fore the irreducibly human dimensions of cybersecurity. The opening keynote, an engaging performance by Kevin Mitnick (once notorious, and now famous hacker, and KnowBe4's Chief Hacking Officer) demonstrated the importance of misdirection to successful attacks of all kinds. In the mid-day keynote, former US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff presented a broad overview of the threat landscape, highlighting the increasing convergence of criminals and nation-state intelligence services, and calling for development of international norms of cyber conflict. He specifically advocated that the global financial system be placed off-limits in cyber conflict, and that recommendation was not prompted merely by the Summit's Wall Street venue. The global financial system is distinctively vulnerable to disruption by cyberwar, and such disruption would have widespread humanitarian consequences of the kind nations (imperfectly) have sought to restrain.

Other presentations and panels brought together investors, security companies, and the buyers of security products. We'll have accounts of those discussions, and some of the lessons learned in incident response, beginning tomorrow: there were interesting observations on how the cyber market is shifting.