Call for Speakers & Trainers

Thank you for your interest. The CFS submission period has closed.

Notifications of Acceptance Scheduled the Week of November 1st.

The 2021 Annual FIRST & AfricaCERT Symposium will take place (virtually) on December 7-9, 2021 with plenary sessions held on December 7 from 11:00-16:30 UTC, with trainings on December 8 and 9 from 11:00-15:00 UTC.

The symposium will be virtual and presented in English. The call for speakers is open to the global community at large, however, ideal candidates are those actively working within the region, or have recent experience working within the region.

If you are interested in participating as a speaker, panelist, or trainer please complete the submission form (button below) for consideration.

Submissions must be received by 20:00 UTC on September 30, 2021.

Please keep the following in mind before submitting:

• Plenary and panel sessions are limited to either 30 or 60-minute durations, inclusive of audience question and answer. Plenary and panel sessions will host multiple speakers. Individual talk times will range anywhere from 10-20-minutes. Plenary and panel topics can be found below.

• If you are seeking to submit training material, you will be expected to provide an abstract, training objective, attendee requirements, a basic outline, and participation capacity limits at submission. Training durations per day may range from 2-4 hours. Two-day continuous trainings are welcome.

• Please have a brief biography (1-2 paragraphs) ready at submission time.

• This event will be open to the community at large and will be recorded for public viewing. Plenary and training materials should be TLP: WHITE. For more information about the Traffic Light Protocol, visit https://www.first.org/tlp/.

• No marketing presentations or trainings that purposely promote vendor products.

Plenary and Panel Topics Include:

• Open-source Tools and CSIRT Success Stories This session aims to focus on the open-source tools readily available to the incident response and security community and CSIRTs success stories. Speakers should be able to share their success stories as well as successful projects implementing open-source tools within their infrastructures.

• CSIRT Frameworks and Related Standards This session aims to present frameworks related to CSIRT and a like organizations creation, operation, and maturity evaluation. Speakers should also be able to discuss emerging cyber security standards and models useful to incident response and security teams operation.

• Open Data (OSINT) and Threat Intelligence Sharing Platforms and Tools This session aims to present threat intelligence sharing platforms and tools, along with a presentation of opportunities and tools for the exploitation of open-source data (OSINT) during incident investigation activities. The desired outcome is to reflect on the strategic role of such platforms in promoting collaboration among CSIRTS and supporting national and regional exchange information models.

• Panel: Observed Malicious Cyber Criminality During COVID in the African and Arab Regions Seeking panelists who can offer experience and discussion on attack trend updates (malware, bots, DDoS, etc.), CSIRT observations, new tendencies, and challenges, malicious and cyber criminality during COVID in the African and Arab regions.

• Panel: Regional and International Initiatives Seeking panelist who can offer experience and discussion on ongoing and future regional and international initiatives, projects, and funds for CSIRT creation, capacity building, and services tuning.