Another conference: Cybersecurity Conference and Expo

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A reader pointed me to another cybersecurity conference – the 2011 Cybersecurity Conference and Expo taking place this December in Washington, DC.  This is a cool concept as it brings together government and private industry to learn about advanced technologies and strategies addressing global information security threats.

Just poking around at the agenda, there some interesting topics:

  • The mind of the hacker
  • The latest cyber attack vectors
  • The current state and future of cybersecurity

These mesh well with my current set of interests.  I like looking into the hacker ethic (I’ve written about this in the past).  FBI criminal profiling has always been fascinating to me and two years ago when I attended the Virus Bulletin Conference in Barcelona, one of the speaks was from the UN and he did a presentation entitled “Profiling Hackers.”  I also almost never write about spammers themselves, but whenever I see others do it (such as Brian Krebs in his blog), those are among my favorite posts.

I’m also interested in seeing attack vectors.  Fighting spam email, I only ever get to see one slice of the security industry.  Thus, while I hear about attacks and can give you there names, I’m not 100% sure on how they work.  I also wonder how new these techniques are, or whether they’ve just been around forever and seem new to use because they are hitting high profile targets.

Exploits of a Mom

 

Finally, the keynote speaker is Shawn Henry, Executive Assistant Director of Criminal, Cyber Response and Services branch at the FBI.  I always enjoy hearing from law enforcement officials at these types of conferences.  At a MAAWG conference, I heard one official speak and it was one of my favorite presentations.  We in industry are always saying “Why can’t law enforcement do this?” or “Why don’t they do that?”  Stuff like this gives me a peek behind the scenes because let’s face it – I know how the legal system works but I don’t know what federal agents do on daily basis.  Most of what I know I learned from the X-Files and Catch Me If You Can.  Hearing from one of the head guys at the FBI is pretty cool.

I don’t have any affiliation with this conference.  I’m not even going to be there (I’ll be on another continent). I bring this up because it is relevant to my current interest set (cyber security topics, not “boring” stuff like Privacy) and it looks like people could learn a thing or two.

If any of you are going, let me know how it went.