FIRST to hold its 30th Conference in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, June 6^th, 2018 – The 30^th annual conference of The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) will take place in Malaysia from June 24 to June 30 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

The Annual FIRST Conference promotes worldwide coordination and cooperation among Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs).

The Conference Program Chair, Jeffrey Carpenter, remarks, “2018 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the conference and we want to spend some time during the program 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 organization whose members step in when major security incidents happen. The organization 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 organization brings to the table.”

About FIRST

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.

Having grown from a handful people with solid expertise and knowledge about security issues, FIRST today is comprised of over 400 teams from over 80 countries, a wide variety of security and incident response teams. This also includes product security teams that come from the government, commercial and academic sectors.

About the FIRST Conference

The FIRST conference is a forum for sharing goals, ideas and information on how to improve global computer security. 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 analyzing network vulnerabilities.

A five-day event, the conference includes Incident Response, Management and Technical tracks. There are several presentations from featured invited and keynote speakers, along with tracks for Special Interest Groups (SIGs) & Birds of a Feather (BoFs) sessions. The conference also features Lightning Talks, a Vendor Showcase and Exhibits along with Networking Opportunities.

By attending the FIRST Conference, delegates will gain a deeper understanding of FIRST’s mission and can earn up to 25 continuing professional education credits. They will learn the latest security strategies in incident management and boost their knowledge and technical insight into security problems and their solutions.

“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,” says Carpenter. He adds, “Delegates make professional acquaintances that they can utilize after the conference is over.”

FIRST Conference Program

The 2018 conference will explore privacy issues at a deeper level than that of previous years. Carpenter says, “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 organizations.”

This year the program will group Product Security talks into a mini track and there is a new track with several talks that are related to aspects of security and incident response on the Internet of Things. Like previous years, one the most popular threads to the conference program will be a talk around one big incident, presented by the organization faced with the challenge.

Carpenter says, “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 programs, 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.

Leading Companies Participate

Actively participating in the Forum and Vendor Showcase are companies including Microsoft (Diamond Sponsor), AWS, Alibaba, Polyswarm (Platinum) and VMRay, NC4, BitSight, Google, Booz Allen Hamilton, Rapid7, Anomali, OneTrust (Gold). Silver sponsors include Insignary, Inc., DomainTools, Recorded Future, Arctic Security and FIRST Japan Teams.

The Forum’s Banquet is sponsored by IBM Resilient and Surevine is sponsoring the Ice Breaker Reception. AWS is the sponsor of the Conference Lounge/Security Jam.

Cisco is sponsoring Network, and Time Malaysia is sponsoring Internet connection.

The local host of the Forum is CyberSecurity Malaysia.

Further information and registration

For more information on the 30^th Annual FIRST Conference in Kuala Lumpur, the conference program and registration procedures, visit https://www.first.org/conference/2018.

Information security professionals interested in attending can email first-2018@first.org.

There is more information available at FIRST’s website https://www.first.org.

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About FIRST

Founded in 1990, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) consists of internet emergency response teams from more than 400 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions across 80 countries in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. It promotes cooperation among computer security incident response teams. For more information, visit http://www.first.org.

About Jeffrey Carpenter

Senior Director of Threat Intelligence and Incident Response Consulting (CTU-TI)
SecureWorks LinkedIn | SecureWorks

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