Boston, MA (PRWEB) July 01, 2014
Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) kicked off the 26th annual conference last Monday.The FIRST conference (http://www.first.org) not only teaches cybersecurity and incident response experts from around the world a wealth of valuable information, it also allows them to build relationships with trustworthy field experts in order to make long-term connections to reference for industry related questions.
Pete Allor, chief financial officer (CFO) of FIRST, mentions the following about the conference, “This community continues to mature and grow across the cybersecurity response field allowing us to exchange and share our vast knowledge and experience between our global connections. The sharing of lessons learned during the conference from our diverse backgrounds is extensively used throughout the year as we respond to various incidents.”
These connections are being built from 67 countries, the top five being United States of America, Japan, United Kingdom, China and Germany, at the highest attended FIRST conference ever reaching over 730 participants – beating last year by over 200 people. Included in this conference are 300 FIRST Member Teams, such as: Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, Symantec, Siemens, eBay, Hewlett Packard, CERT/CC, BT, Hitachi, Google, IBM, NATO, Facebook, Juniper Networks and University of Oxford.
The number of attendees was not the only record this prominent conference broke; it also reached the highest number of speaker submissions ever – totaling 155 entries. The speakers varied in background and touched upon crucial cybersecurity topics such as incident response’s role in national events, the never-ending story of incident response, the role of DHS in securing our nation’s cyberspace, and the roles of people and technology in incident response.
The keynote speakers touched on various topics such as the importance of incident response and cyber considerations in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, presented by Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kieran Ramsey and Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Swindon of the FBI Boston Division. Another noteworthy topic, presented by Eugene Spafford of Purdue University, is that it’s imperative that incident response experts not only respond to cybersecurity issues, they also need to fix cybersecurity issues before they occur.
The exchange of experiences and relationship building will continue at the 27th Annual FIRST Conference in Berlin from June 14-19, 2015. Sign up for this conference is now available on the FIRST website.
FIRST thanks their local host, NBC Universal, and its 35 sponsors for making this conference possible and enabling cybersecurity response experts from across the globe to build trustworthy connections throughout this innovative, community building and idea sharing conference.
About FIRST
Founded in 1990, FIRST consists of internet emergency response teams from more than 300 corporations, government bodies, universities and other institutions from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. It leads the world’s fight back against cybercrime, sabotage and terrorism and promotes cooperation among computer security incident response teams and law enforcement agencies. For more information, visit: http://www.first.org.