Welcome letter

Welcome letter from the Program Committee Chair

Dear Participant,

As the Program Chair for the 16th Annual FIRST Conference in Budapest, I'd like to welcome you to FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) and to information on the conference. FIRST brings together a variety of computer security incident response teams from government, commercial, and academic organizations worldwide to foster cooperation and coordination in incident prevention, to prompt rapid reaction to incidents, and to promote information sharing among members and the computer and network security community at large. As always, we also extend a warm welcome to all our colleagues in the industry who share our interest in improving information protection.

If you or your organization are interested in creating an incident response team or are responsible for the coordination of computer security incidents, whether as a system administrator, network administrator, management, law enforcement, or vendor, you should attend this conference. In addition to the excellent program, the conference provides an excellent environment to meet your peers in computer security, build relationships, and exchange lessons learned.

The 2004 conference program is an exciting combination of technology as well as management sessions. Our key note speakers include Mr. Jacques Bus, Head of the Unit on ICT for Trust and Security for the European Commission; Dave Aucsmith, CTO Security Division, Microsoft Corp.; Joseph Moan, Corporate Legal, The Coca-Cola Company, and Larry Hale, US-CERT, Dept. of Homeland Security. For a quick glance at the entire program, check the Conference Program.

As one of Europe's capital cities, first time visitors to Budapest are usually overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the city. Budapest is a city that manages to surprise and enthrall in equal measure, with reminders of Budapest's rich and often tragic history.

I look forward to meeting you in Budapest for a truly rewarding week.

Katherine T. Fithen
Program Committee Chair

Welcome letter from the FIRST Steering Committee Chair

Dear Participant,

On behalf of the FIRST Steering Committee it is a pleasure to welcome you to Budapest, Hungary and the 16th Annual FIRST Conference on Computer Security Incident Handling.

As the Internet continues to reach out even further - talking about refrigerators and cars accessible via IP addresses - our societies need to recognize that security too often comes as an afterthought. And if this is true for security, it is even more true for incident response. With the increased awareness for the insecurity and criticality of our fragile international information infrastructures, shareholders and decision makers suddenly recognized that there are already networks that are dealing with attacks, vulnerabilities and threats on an international level. While it is true, that the work is done by the teams and their members it is also important to recognize that it takes resources to provide the infrastructure in support of such networks. FIRST - through the work of its members and many volunteers - was able to secure this for over the last 10 years.

FIRST is committed to continue and extend its services and support for the global community of security and incident response teams, not to forget especially the product security teams, to improve cooperation and strengthen their impact. If your organization is not yet a member of FIRST please take this opportunity to become familiar with the FIRST organization and its members.

Our thanks go to many people for helping make this conference happen. In particular we'd like to thank Katherine Fithen (The Coca-Cola Company) as Program Committee Chair as well as Claudia Natanson (BT) and Roger Safian (NU-CERT) as SC liaisons who have worked hard with Phoebe Boelter (Conference & Publication Services, Ltd.) to make this a success.

Many thanks go to everyone who submitted presentations for this event. We recognize that since Blaster in August 2003 the world of security and incident response teams is even more filled with viruses and worms extending their reach to more and more insecure computers around the world. In fact for most of us there is more work than any of us can ever hope to handle, especially as resources inside the teams are not increased appropriately. The additional time that the presenters have taken to document and share their ideas with us is greatly appreciated.

We first sought sponsorship for our event in 1999 and this year we have had tremendous sponsorship support from FIRST team's organizations and we are gradually widening our appeal to other sponsors. Our thanks go out to this year's sponsors for supporting this conference, especially recognizing the support of the Commission of the European Community.

In our effort to continue facilitating interest in the work of CSIRTs around the world, our 2005 conference will be held in Singapore. Singcert will be the local host, and we will work closely with APCERT - the community of teams in Asia / Pacific - to make the first conference in Asia a great success.

Thank you for participating in this year's FIRST conference and making it possible by your attendance. I hope you will enjoy the conference.If this is not your first time attending a FIRST conference then welcome back and I hope you will establish new contacts and continue to expand your network of trust, please help first-time attendees to meet others and generally make people feel at home here. Regardless whether this is your first time with us or not we will endeavor to have you come back again in the future.

Best wishes,

Dr. Klaus-Peter Kossakowski
FIRST Steering Committee Chair