FIRST Conference 2018 offers networking, education opportunity

The 30th annual conference of The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), hosted by CyberSecurity Malaysia, will take place in Malaysia from June 24 to 30 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. 

FIRST is currently comprised of over 400 teams from over 80 countries. This also includes product security teams that come from the government, commercial and academic sectors. Since its inception in 1990, FIRST members have resolved an almost continuous stream of security-related attacks and incidents including handling thousands of security vulnerabilities affecting nearly all the millions of computer systems and networks globally. Designed to facilitate global communication between incident response and security teams, FIRST assists in promoting prompt and effective resolution to computer security incidents. The association also provides access to best practices, tools, and trusted communication with its member teams.

The annual FIRST Conference promotes worldwide coordination and cooperation among computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs). Conference attendees can earn up to 25 continuing professional education credits while they learn the latest security strategies in incident management, increase their knowledge and technical insight about security problems and their solutions, and gain insights into analysing network vulnerabilities. 

Conference Program Chair Jeffrey Carpenter, who is also Senior Director of Threat Intelligence and Incident Response Consulting (CTU-TI) at SecureWorks said, “2018 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the conference and we want to spend some time during the programme to look back over the past 30 years of incident response as well as keep people informed about current happenings in response. 

"FIRST is a really unique organisation whose members step in when major security incidents happen. The organisation has been around longer than when most people on the planet learned about the Internet, and so there's a lot of history and knowledge this organisation brings to the table.”

The five-day event includes tracks on Incident Response, Management as well as a Technical track. Sessions have been planned for special interest groups (SIGs) and Birds of a Feather (BoFs) sessions. A BoF is for conference delegates who are interested in a particular topic and would like to discuss it further on an informal basis at the conference venue. The conference also features lightning talks - presentations lasting a few minutes - a vendor showcase and exhibits along with networking opportunities. Sponsors will be at the forum and the showcase, including Microsoft (a Diamond sponsor), AWS, Alibaba, and Polyswarm (Platinum sponsors), as well as VMRay, NC4, BitSight, Google, Booz Allen Hamilton, Rapid7, Anomali, and OneTrust (Gold sponsors). Silver sponsors include Insignary, DomainTools, Recorded Future, Arctic Security and FIRST Japan Teams. 

“There are a lot of opportunities at the conference for people to communicate with each other, to network and be in workshops where you have hands-on application,” said Carpenter. 

The 2018 conference will explore privacy issues at a deeper level than that of previous years. Carpenter explained, “Privacy and incident response are great partners to work together when an organization is having a security problem and potentially a breach. Privacy as a whole has been brought to the forefront with changes in regulation around the world over the past couple of years. Some of the content relates to GDPR, which has been a hot topic for a couple of years now and is really coming to the forefront around the time of the conference. Not only will a lot of people be interested in this, they will be able to talk about their experiences with GDPR within their own organisations.”

This year the programme will group product security talks into a mini track. Some talks will be related to aspects of security and incident response on the Internet of Things (IoT). As in previous years, one the most popular threads to the conference programme will be a talk around a single big incident, presented by the organisation faced with the challenge.

Carpenter said, “One thing we are doing differently this year is that, in the past, there has always been one or two talks a day that were most engaging and generated a lot of intense discussion, but there was never enough time in the Q&A session to get into a dialogue. This year for the first time, we will take a talk from the previous day and have a follow-up discussion the next day with the speaker and potentially some other folks who have experience around that topic area, to further drive the discussion.”

FIRST welcomes any information security practitioner, including those who head up and lead information security programmes, make and implement technical decisions, but also policy and decision makers who have overall security responsibility, law enforcement staff who investigate cybercrimes and legal counsel who work on breach response to participate in the conference.