FIRST: Initiatives and international cooperation

Security workshop / 3rd COLARIS

Tuesday — October 16th, 2007 11:40

As attackers have changed their technologies and tactics over the years,incident responders have adapted out of necessity. One thing has remained constant: the human factor. Even with all of today's automated intrusion detection, rapid communications, etc., nothing helps incident responders as much as knowing who the person at the other end of the phone or email is.FIRST is an international organization that helps foster those interpersonal relationships and human networks. This talk with present an introduction to FIRST and what it is doing to help incident responders around the world deal with today's information security problems.

Presenters

• Kenneth van Wyk (FIRST.Org, US)

  

  Kenneth R. van Wyk is an internationally recognized information security expert and author of the O´Reilly and Associates books, Incident Response and Secure Coding. In addition to providing consulting and training services through his company, KRvW Associates, LLC, (http://www.KRvW.com), he currently holds numerous positions: as a monthly columnist for on-line security portal, eSecurityPlanet (http://www.eSecurityPlanet.com), and a Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (http://www.sei.cmu.edu).

  Ken has 20+ years experience as an IT Security practitioner in the academic, military, and commercial sectors. He has held senior and executive technologist positions at Tekmark, Para-Protect, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), in addition to the U.S. Department of Defense and Carnegie Mellon and Lehigh Universities.

  Ken also served a two-year elected position as a member of the Steering Committee, and a one-year elected position as the Chairman of the Steering Committee, for the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) organization. At the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Ken was one of the founders of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT®). He holds an engineering degree from Lehigh University and is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, and has presented papers and speeches for CSI, ISF, USENIX, FIRST, AusCERT, and others. Ken is also a CERT® Certified Computer Security Incident Handler.