Australia's Leading Computer Emergency Response Team

AusCERT2008 comes to a close
Date: 23 May 2008
Original URL: http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?cid=7066&it=9334

Once again, the invited speakers for AusCERT2008 didn't disappoint us and from our perspective, everything ran smoothly. My personal highlights were:

  • Tuesday morning's plenary session: John Stewart (CSO, CISCO) who spoke about "Cisco Strategic Security Approach" and Bill Cheswick on "Rethinking Passwords". John's presentation seemed really candid about the challenges faced by Cisco and what he intends to do about them at a broad level. Ches' "wacko" ideas presentation made the topic of passwords very entertaining and reaffirms Bill's reputation as a legend of the Internet security.

  • Walter Muller who spoke about "IPS for Real - Surviving active Intrusion Prevention in a mission-critical network". A very nice presentation from the "real world", describing the implementation of an Intrusion Prevention Systems in a critical infrastructure organisation.

  • The closing presentations of Rob Redenbach's presentation and a panel led by Adam Spensor. In addition to being interesting (Rob's particularly), both of these made me laugh almost as hard as when I saw Tripod at the gala dinner.

  • Scott McIntyre's "Building a Walled Garden - Abuse and Incident Handling Tooling for Network Managers". An excellent, practical tutorial on security tooling on multi-gigabit network, delivered in Scott's in engaging style.

I've heard there were loads of cracking presentations, but you can't get around to see them all. We are very keen to hear from our members any additional feedback (good and bad) they wish to provide, so that we can make this an even better event next year.

Also, this year's conference saw AusCERT launch a survey of home user systems (our previous survey was more tailored towards the enterprise). You can find the survey at http://www.auscert.org.au/usersurvey.


On to the media coverage:


Thanks to all those who attended and enjoyed AusCERT2008 - we hope to see you back next year.

--
Rob.