Peak Incident Response 2026

By Serge Droz, FIRST Board of Directors
Monday, May 18th, 2026

This year we held our first Swiss Technical Colloquium - Peak Incident Response - as part of the Geneva Cyber Week (GCW). So, why another TC? The GCW is an annual global platform to advance international cooperation and resilience in cyberspace. This sounds a bit like it could describe just about any FIRST event. But the GCW mostly caters to policy folks, diplomats, and members of civil society, including some of our trusted partners such as DCAF and the HD Centre.

These folks approach cybersecurity from a very different angle: it's a lot about responsible behaviour, reduction of conflicts, and human rights. These are all important topics, and it's important that the technical community is aware of them — but it's equally important that the policy community understands how the internet works and what the technical risks are. In particular, it feels important to continue to point out that the internet is a global infrastructure that can only be secured by all of us together.

In the CFP we asked speakers to focus on topics that have a global impact in one way or another. Consequently, we had a lot of talks about DNS, which is the obvious global infrastructure. Topics ranged from the very technical (how do you find the bad guys by looking at DNS?) to more policy-themed topics (why using DNS for content moderation may not be a good idea).

One of the highlights for me was the unscripted conversation between Florian Schütz, Director of the NCSC.ch, and Giacomo Persi Paoli, head of UNIDIR's Security and Technology Programme. This is exactly what we need: talking across our bubbles, taking FIRST's motto of "Improving Security Together" to the next level. Another big topic throughout the week was, not surprisingly, AI — which tends to have unexpected effects. Notably, AI-generated bug reports have become high quality, which is good, but also very numerous, overwhelming existing projects. Because one thing that doesn't go up is funding for FOSS projects — and with FOSS being part of a whopping 96% of all shipped software, this doesn't bode well.

Will We Do It Again?

Next year the GCW will happen May 3–7. Will we do it again? Probably, but… But what? We totally underestimated the amount of work needed to organise such an event, and in the end, instead of the 10 people who said they would help, only four were active (kudos to you all). But I think it was well worth it, and maybe it also carries a lesson: we keep talking about global collaboration and all of us working together, but in the end most things that happen do so because of a few individuals putting in the work to make something happen that they are passionate about. That something may be different for each of us. So I'm pretty sure we'll do it again — even though right now I'm longing more for a weekend in the mountains.

The Geneva "Jet d'eau" was illuminated in the colors of the Geneva Cyber Week to symbolize the importance of a free, secure and open Internet.