I’m on a flight from Madrid, Spain back to Atlanta. I’ve been in Spain all week participating in a series of meetings with Panda Security and participating in their first Security Bloggers Summit. I was honored to share the stage with Bruce Schneier, Steve Ragan, Byron Acohido and several key members of Spain’s information security community. We spent a couple of hours talking about the state of information security and some of the things that we could do to get some immediate relief. We also took questions from the audience and had some lively discussions about several topics including one of my favorites Security Awareness Training. Needless to say we did not all see eye to eye on that topic. You can read more about the summit here. If you can read Spanish I also have several links to sites in Spain that wrote about the event. Email me and I’ll send them to you (but you have to translate them and tell me what they said) 
I also spent a day with several members of the Panda Security team talking about security, some of the things that they are seeing and what they are doing about it. We had conference call with one of their researchers and was able to pick his brain a bit about what happens in the course of a day for them.
This was a great trip. It was an opportunity to learn, share and get to know some new friends. I’m very grateful that Panda invited me to join them for this. It was an honor to be able to add a little to the international security community in person. One thing that I must say about the whole event. It was truly about improving security and not about Panda Security. This wasn’t a showcase for them to say Panda, Panda, Panda. It was them sponsoring something that will benefit security as a whole. At one point during our summit discussion Byron mentioned Panda by name and the moderator reminded him that they did not want vendors to be named during the discussion.
In addition to the speaking and learning I had the opportunity to explore Madrid. WOW! What a city! I spent most of my time in the Art district where the hotel was. I bet I walked 10k every day exploring. Getting lost in that part of town would be very easy because every street has more streets off of them. The building are beautiful and if you weren’t careful you would have wandered way off course and not had a clue where you were.
I’m not going to turn this into Andy, SpainGuy so I won’t linger too much on the tourist part of the trip but if you ever get the chance to go there I’d recommend that you do. The city is amazing, the sites are incredible and the food is unbelievable.
