The FIRST Conference took place during the week of June 16–21, 2013. This was my first time at this annual event which took place in Bangkok, Thailand, this year. After getting accustomed to humid and very hot weather (in comparison with cold Spring weather in Switzerland), I was eager to meet my incident response peers who came from all around the world to this beautiful country and city. The conference welcomed 520 security professionals from more than 60 countries. USA was represented with more than 100 participants; Europe and Asia followed the lead. Africa’s representatives were just a few, and there was a wish to increase the continent’s participation for next years.
Since Kudelski Security’s application was still in the pipe when our team arrived to the conference, we did not have the MEMBER ribbon on our name cards in the beginning. Great news, though, by the time the conference came to an end, Kudelski Security’s membership was approved!
ThaiCERT, EDTA, MICT and Thai government made this event a real pleasure to attend. Its organization was immaculate. During the week, we heard Her Excellency Ms. Yingluck Shinawatra – Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand speaking about the importance Thailand is attributing to cyber security. Additionally, the Minister of ICT was present during the show of Wednesday’s night banquet.
Let me make some comments about the content of the FIRST event.
The key part of the event was around the necessity of collaboration for the emergency response teams worldwide. Knowing your counterpart in another country may be critical during crisis for ensuring a “trusted link” in case of support needs. Other discussed issues were around trends in:
• Malware detection using sandboxing
• Sharing information among CERTs
• Threat Intelligence and big data and how to gather that kind of needed data
• IPv6 discussions
In addition, some presenters shared their innovative / open source security tools and ways of using existing toolset for specific purposes. On vendor side, most of the official exhibitors promoted advanced threats detection and advanced monitoring, as well as big data analytics tools.
This event was well worth attending for ensuring networking between CERTs and for giving food for thought on new ways to tackle security incidents… See you all next year in Boston!
Kudelski Security Research 