OK, first let me say that the GFIRST conference was a lot of fun. I’m not 100% sure why because if you followed my Twitter comments about some of the talks I wasn’t overly impressed. Yet, in spite of that I still really enjoyed myself. Here is a short summary of my 2 days there.

Day One
The Keynote by Dave DeWalt, President and CEO of McAfee, was entertaining if nothing else. He does give a good talk, but it leaves you wondering. He had lots of great figures and talking points but nothing to back it up. What I mean was no references just “McAfee Research”. Not that I doubt what he said so much as it would be nice to see some of the data that was used to get to these numbers.

I sat in on 4 sessions other than the keynote and got a 50% passing score. What I mean was that 2 of them were pretty good and the other two…. One was OK except that the information was dated and at least to me a bit elementary. Maybe part of that is because I’m cynical and hang around with too many really smart people who keep me in the loop better than many others. The other talk was just painful. To the point where it was all I could do to not walk out (as I’ve been known to do). I just kept holding out hope that the guy would pull it together and I’d discover that Web 2.0 wasn’t all messed up, but he didn’t. Actually the only thing that the talk had to do with Web 2.0 was the fact that the title contained the word Web 2.0

Day Two
Today was a better day. I was only able to sit in on two sessions and both of them were pretty good. No complaints from either. One was a “Tool Talk” where the presenter basically gave a list of IR tools and talked a little about them and what they were best suited for. The other was a talk on the evolving strategies around cyber security. The presenter was Amit Yoran of NetWitness and he has some interesting takes on the state of the industry and what we need to do to make it better. The one phrase that stuck with me was basically “We’ve already lost and it’s going to get worse before it get’s better”. Not exactly a pep talk, but when you’re getting your butt kicked sometime a reality check is what is needed more than a pep talk.

The folks that put on GFIRST did a first class job in organizing and executing. I wish I could go back for Thursday and Friday but I need to get cracking on my honey do list.