Companies are paying more attention to safeguarding their digital assets, but the overall state of corporate data security is still poor, said hackers and security experts attending the CanSecWest conference on Thursday. The conference - whose speakers include creators of major open-source security tools as well as security specialists - has brought together not theorists but the software mechanics who create and break network security for a living. The evaluation of current Internet security seemed grim. "Awareness is growing," said Lance Spitzner, founder of the Honeynet Project and a security engineer at Sun Microsystems. "But so much stuff is being placed on the network that we can't keep up with securing (it)."