28th Annual FIRST Conference in Seoul

June 23, 2016 (Seoul) – The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), a recognized global leader in incident response has successfully finished its 28^th Annual Conference, which takes place this June (12^th – 18^th) in Seoul, South Korea. Co-hosted by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), KISA (Korea Internet Security Agency) and KrCERT/CC, the conference was held at Conrad Seoul.

For its 28^th annual conference, FIRST had 645 attendees from a total of 63 countries. Topics under discussion at this year’s conference range from threat intelligence sharing and detecting targeted web compromises, to the missing links between cybercrime gangs and the dark side of online advertisements. Each day of the conference opened with a keynote from an expert in information technology and cyber security.

Maarten Van Horenbeeck from the Board pointed out that the most significant feature of FIRST is sharing knowledge and information. “In this modern world, everyone is interconnected with everyone,” said Maarten. ”It’s very important we establish forums for knowledge exchange like our annual watering hole, the FIRST conference, to ensure everyone involved in operating the internet can deliver together on its promise of bringing internet users closer together for business and social activity.”

Ahead of the conference, FIRST organized a successful Education Summit, in which participants from across the world met to review the status of development of the FIRST CSIRT Services Framework. Earlier this year, on March 30th, FIRST published version 1.0 of the framework in the six main United Nations languages, and in this meeting, the summit group decided on next steps to widen the scope of the project to also cover product security needs. It will be available in more languages and will be used to train and educate how to coordinate security incidents.

FIRST is a non-profit organization where international confederation of trusted computer incident response teams cooperatively handle computer security incidents and promote incident prevention programs. A number of national CSIRTs are in membership of FIRST, and KNCERT (Korea National Computer Emergency Response Team) is one of them. There are 8 Korea teams in FIRST membership, including AhnLab Security and NAVER Business Platform, two of the nation’s IT leaders.

FIRST aims to foster cooperation and coordination in incident prevention, to stimulate rapid reaction to incidents, and to promote information sharing among members and the community at large. Thanks to its Fellowship program, FIRST had six national incident response teams from Côte d'Ivoire, Myanmar, Ghana, Bangladesh, Tanzania and Mongolia supported to participate to the community this year.

This year’s conference, on the other hand, was open to both FIRST and non-FIRST members and welcomed IT managers, network and system administrators, software and hardware vendors, law enforcement representatives, security solutions providers, telecommunications organizations, ISPs, and general computer and network security personnel. More information regarding the conference can be found at https://www.first.org/conference/2016

Media Contact

Four Communications (London)
Harry Saunders	+44 (0)20 3697 4329 harry.saunders@fourcommunications.com
Janine Maxwell	+44 (0)20 3697 4351 janine.maxwell@fourcommunications.com
Communications Korea (Seoul)
Johnny Ahn	02-511-7606/ 010-2468-5222 jh.ahn@commkorea.com
June Kim	02-511-7446 / 010-2789-2727 june27@commkorea.com

About FIRST

Founded in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is made up of internet security teams from more than 350 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions across 76 countries. Its goal is to promote cooperation and information-sharing among computer security incident response teams through events, training and education, and working groups. For more information, visit: https://www.first.org.