"Freakonomics" Author Stephen J. Dubner will Address Risk in Opening Keynote Boston, MA - June 8, 2011 - Rapid7®, the leading provider of unified vulnerability management and penetration testing solutions, today announced its organization and sponsorship of the UNITED Security Summit on September 19 - 20, 2011. UNITED, which stands for "Using New Ideas to Empower Defenders" will be held at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, CA, bringing together IT managers, leading-edge security professionals, innovative startups, open source projects and academics to foster collaboration and innovation in addressing the changing security landscape. The UNITED Security Summit will revolve around the "anatomy of a breach", examining a data breach from all angles, including impact, prevention and response. Attendees of the event will be eligible for up to 16 CPE credits, depending on the number of sessions they attend. "Information security is a hard problem: there is no silver bullet, and it's even harder tackling the challenge alone. The only solution is to bring everyone together: academics and practitioners, business people and technologists, open source project and commercial vendors," said Mike Tuchen, Rapid7 president and CEO. "The goal of the UNITED Security Summit is to offer a holistic approach that will highlight security challenges from a security and operational viewpoint. The event is truly its own breed of show; we've never seen a security conference like this before and feel that the industry needs the time and place to gather and innovate." Keeping with the theme of innovation and collaboration, the UNITED keynote will be presented by Stephen J. Dubner, award-winning author, journalist, radio and TV personality best known for co-writing international best-sellers Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics with economist Steven D. Levitt. Known for taking a new, real-world approach to discussing economics, Dubner will provide attendees with his fresh perspective on risk and business. "In a world where so many risks are overstated, it's safe to say that the risk of information-security breaches is very real - as evidenced by the headlines we see just about every day. I'm looking forward to speaking to a group of people working on such a worthwhile problem," said Stephen J. Dubner. The event will also examine the "anatomy of a breach." To this end, Rapid7 has created a scenario in which a fake company, complete with fake back story, has been hacked. The scenario itself is inspired by several high profile attacks that have taking place over the last year. Industry experts will walk attendees through the incident response, forensic analysis, remediation, mitigation and the actual attack. Attendees will walk away understanding intrusion and mitigation strategies in depth. In addition, UNITED will encourage discussions through presentations, interactive Ask-the-Expert panels, Birds-of-a-Feather discussions and real life case studies. On Monday evening, there will also be an award ceremony highlighting leadership and innovation as well as the UNITED Security Summit Party. Additional details will be released for the show in the coming months. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.unitedsummit.org/.