I hope that 2024 is off to a great start for each of you!
The Board of Directors and staff kicked off the year with a board meeting in January hosted at the ICANN headquarters in Washington, D.C. In addition to the regular board meeting program, the location enabled the board and staff to meet with members and partners such as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP). Opportunities for potential collaboration in the future were identified, and we look forward to exploring those further.
The Norwegian FIRST members gathered at the University of Oslo just before Christmas 2023 to compete in a friendly CTF.
Just before Christmas in 2023, 30 cyber security professionals met at the University of Oslo for a friendly capture the flag competition and gingerbread cookie eating. The competition utilized the CTF platform and challenges managed by the CTF SIG of FIRST. A couple of volunteers from mnemonic IRT was granted access to the platform, and chose a number of challenges for the Christmas meeting, in addition to creating a few away from keyboard-challenges for this event in particular.
Online good and bad actors alike use services provided by different kinds of companies, like content or DNS hosting, email sending and receiving, or domain name registration. The good guys, on one hand, use them for legitimate purposes like running businesses that may sell products or services, help connect people, bring music, graphic or video content to the users, provide information, and so on. We all use them frequently and are thankful that they exist.
FIRST welcomed 25 newcomers between November 2023 and January 2024 : 19 teams, and 6 liaisons. They are based in Europe (15), North America (4) and South America (4). Congratulations to all of them, thank you for all the primary and secondary sponsors who accompanied them. It is a real effort that is to be recognized. Stay tuned! FIRST is happy to extend its membership to 1 new country, reaching 108 countries: Liechtenstein. A warm welcome to CSIRT.LI!
FIRST published a Request for Proposals for ‘Public Relations Services’ in December 2023. Almost two dozen bids were received, analyzed, and a shortlist of 4 was finalized and meetings were organized. At the end of the reviewing process, FIRST decided to appoint Growth Stack Media as its agency of record for public relations.
This strategic collaboration signals a significant advancement in FIRST's communication strategy.
Link to the announcement
https://www.first.org/newsroom/announce/20240208
Get ready to join us for the 2024 FIRST Annual Conference, June 9-14 in Fukuoka, Japan! The conference registration is currently open! Make sure to reserve your seat before it closes - the standard rate is available until 19 April, 2024.
The training program, which takes place on Sunday before the conference, is already published. The trainers will be offering a variety of technical and non-technical sessions. Please take a look and join us!
At the January 2024 FIRST board meeting in Washington D.C. we approved the charter for the FIRST standards committee. Many thanks to all you hardworking (and patient!) committee members who have helped us define the charter over the past few months. This was a challenging process, but we’re happy to have achieved consensus, and now we’re picking up momentum.
AI-Security SIG
Have you already heard about our AI-Security SIG? They are super active and currently still meet once per week (every Wednesday at 4 PM CET). It's a challenge to find speakers at this high intensity cadence, but luckily we are in a very dynamic field where there is lots to talk about and lots to digest even on a weekly basis.
The AI CTI benchmark dataset sub-group started and is actively working on creating a benchmark dataset for AI CTI tasks (summarization, Named Entity Recognition, etc.). We expect to show some initial results at the CTI Berlin symposium.
From all meetings there are notes in our wiki. If you are interested in joining or presenting about a related topic, please reach out to the SIG chairs.
Red Team SIG
The Red Team SIG just got a new chair (Sudhanshu Shekhar Sharma) who continues the SIG Mission. RT SIG will re-open intake for active offensive security community leaders and contributors to initially target content refresh on RT SIG Wiki by Q2 2024.
Are you aware of the social network presence of FIRST? Our handle name is ‘firstdotorg’. Time to start following us if you haven’t done so.
February 26-March 1, 2024
Tenerife, Spain
March 5-7, 2024
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Hosted by Human Security, Cisco
March 20-22, 2024
Durrës, Albania
March 25-27, 2024
Raleigh (NC), United States
April 15-17, 2024
Berlin, Germany
Mercure Hotel MOA Berlin
June 9-14, 2024
Fukuoka, Japan