Well it's been a couple of weeks since the AISA annual conference in Sydney and I've just about caught up from the day off!
I just really wanted to post an account of the conference as it truly was a red letter day for the Australian Information Security Association.
I've been to a few annual seminar days held in Sydney usually hosted at one of the bank's and spoken at one in Melbourne (as one of my last duties as outgoing branch executive) and this was the best!
Let's just go through some key points why it was so awesome:
- Sydney conference center
- delegates from Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
- 650 plus people registered (and it looked like they all turned up)
- 30 plus exhibitors
- two international speakers (Bruce Schneier and Marcus Ranum)
- CIO of one of the largest banks in Australia speaking
- CSO of Cisco speaking
- FREE yes FREE to AISA Members (membership is $55 per year)
I put a few faces to names at the coffee cart by suggesting a tweet up. I quickly realised how tall @caseyjohnellis is in real life and what a cool accent @VS_ has.
I ran into Marcus Ranum at the coffee cart line and Bruce Schneier on the floor. I have to admit to being a little star struck!
I really enjoyed the presentation from John N Stewart Cisco's CSO. I really thought it was a useful presentation with lessons learnt. I was really dreading this one as, I thought it would be very "producty" where it was actually the most pragmatic of the day!
Marcus Ranum's presentation went right off on a tangent! The less free thinking in the audience probably were all like "What is this guy on about? Is he trying to encourage us to start a revolution and commit criminal damage and computer crime?". I really took his presentation as a challenge to us security professionals to think like a "misguided hacktivist" and consider how our organisations could be "pranked" and subjected to "economic denial of service" by protestors motivated by an organisational policy they dis-agree with.
AISA really is kicking a few goals at the moment in my humble opinion some examples below:
-new website (finally)
-ongoing focus group meetings http://www.aisa.org.au/for-members/focus-groups/ so you can talk to other security professionals in your area of expertise
- 1600 members
- AISA is providing submissions to the Australian Government on their "Cyber Whitepaper" on behalf of Australian information security professionals
- AISA is policing members for non-compliance with the code of conduct.
