Call for Speakers and Trainings

The 2025 Annual FIRST & AfricaCERT Symposium will take place December 2-5, 2025 in Mauritius. Training activities are scheduled for December 2 and 3 with plenary sessions on December 4.

The call for speakers and trainings is open to the global community at large. Ideal candidates are those actively working within the region, or have recent experience working within the region.

If you are interested in participating as a speaker, panelist, or trainer please complete the submission form for consideration.

Submissions must be received by 20:00 UTC on October 14, 2025.

Please keep the following guidelines in mind before submitting:

• Plenary and panel sessions are limited to either 30 or 60-minute durations, inclusive of audience question and answer. Plenary and panel sessions will host multiple speakers. Individual talk times will range anywhere from 10-20-minutes. Plenary and panel topics can be found below.

• If you are seeking to submit training material, you will be expected to provide an abstract, training objective, attendee requirements, a basic outline, and participation capacity limits at submission. Training durations per day may range from 2-4 hours. Two-day continuous trainings are welcome.

• Please have a brief biography (1-2 paragraphs) ready at submission time.

• This event will be open to the community at large and will be recorded for public viewing. Plenary and training materials should be TLP:CLEAR. For more information about the Traffic Light Protocol, visit https://www.first.org/tlp/.

No marketing presentations or trainings that purposely promote vendor products.

Submission Form Here

Call for Speakers & Trainers Guidelines

We welcome all themes and topics that might be of interest to incident response teams.

Suggested Session and Panel Topics

• Incident Handling
  • Case studies, lessons learned, IR playbooks
  • Tools, trends, and security technologies
  • Attack trend updates (malware, bots, DDoS, etc.)
  • Malware analysis, anti-virus evasion, etc.
  • AI and ML applications, AI approaches applied to network attacks detection
    
    
• Network Monitoring
  • Attack detection, mitigation, and remediation
  • Attack trend updates (malware, bots, DDoS, etc.)
  • DNS, IPv6, and routing security and best practices
    
    
• Application and Product Security
  • Product security, PSIRT
  • Supply chain cyber resilience
  • CVE
    
    
• Open-source Tooling
  • OSINT
  • Threat intelligence sharing platforms and tools
    
    
• Standards and Frameworks
  • CIS controls
  • Security standards
    
    
• Cyber Security Policy and Strategy
  • Norms and CBMs
  • Cybersecurity economics
  • Funding models
  • National strategies
  • Capacity building
  • Security awareness
• Team Updates
• Data Privacy
• Social Media Mitigation Best Practices

Suggested Training Topics

• ICS security
• Social media mitigation best practices
• Misinformation and disinformation
• Ransomware incident response
• Malware analysis
• Threat intelligence
• IntelMQ
• OSINT
• Application security
• Zero Trust Network
• DDOS
• Data security
• Digital forensics
• Penetration testing

Submission Form Here