OPCDE 2018 – Keynote speakers & notes!
Gentle reminder: Less than three weeks (Jan 7) before the closure of our call for papers!
Our first chapter which happened in April 2017 was great (at least that’s what the speakers told me 🙂 ), and we are back for the second chapter on April 6-7 2018!
I’m proud to announce our two keynote speakers: Dan Cuthbert (Global Head of Cyber Security Research at Santander Bank Group) and Dean De Beer (Product Line CTO, Advanced Threat at Cisco). Both are dear friends of the infosec community and have done a lot over the past 20 years, it’s a real privilege to have them speaking in Dubai!
After discussing with Ryan Naraine (he is awesome too) about how the Year 2017 has been, we agreed that having a roundtable around the topic moderated by him with some guests he would hand-pick, could be quite awesome. This is another thing I’m really looking forward too, the name of the guests and more details will be disclosed closer to the date.
Our final list of training courses is also public, Joe Slowik from Dragos Inc will deliver an ICS Network Defense course, Monnappa K A will deliver a training on malware analysis and memory forensics, and Richard Johnson from Cisco’s Talos cool-kids team will deliver a course on automating vulnerability discovery and triage. All of them are good and well respected security researchers and the content is highly relevant given the recent trends.
More details for the student CTF will be disclosed in January around the same time as the final schedule will be published. We are still committed to our goal to give back to the community and to focus on technical content rather than marketing blah-blah. All the hacks and the lack of education globally around those incidents just prove again why focusing on content delivery is important for the ecosystem.
I guess that’s pretty much it, sponsoring opportunities are here, and also if you are planning to submit to the CFP – our dear Review Board member Kimberlee Price posted a really good Twitter thread with a bunch of advice which I highly recommend you to read. This one is my favorite:
2a/9 Write a complete abstract that highlights 1. what you're going to cover 2. what is new or interesting about it 3. what the audience walks away with the ability to implement as a result of attending.
The number of vague half-assed abstracts I see is staggering.
— KymPossible (@Kym_Possible) December 12, 2017
— Matt Suiche, Proud member of SVC
