Thanks for a Great Incident Detection Summit

We had a great SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2009 this week! About 100 people attended. I'd like to thank those who joined the event as attendees; those who participated as keynotes (great work Ron Gula and Tony Sager), guest moderators (Rocky DeStefano, Mike Cloppert, and Stephen Windsor), speakers, and panelists; Debbie Grewe and Carol Calhoun from SANS for their excellent logistics and planning, along with our facilitators, sound crew, and staff; our sponsors, Allen Corp., McAfee, NetWitness, and Splunk; and also Alan Paller for creating the two-day "WhatWorks" format.

I appreciate the feedback from everyone who spoke to me. It sounds like the mix of speakers and panels was a hit. I borrowed this format from Rob Lee and his Incident Repsonse and Computer Forensics summits, so I am glad people liked it. I think the sweet spot for the number of panelists might be 4 or 5, depending on the topic. If it's more theoretical, with a greater chance of audience questions, a smaller number is better. If it's more of a "share what you know," like the tools and techniques panel, then a bigger number is ok.

Probably the best news from the Summit was the fact that SANS already scheduled the second edition -- the SANS WhatWorks in Incident Detection Summit 2010, 8-9 December 2010 in DC. I still need to talk to SANS about how it will work. They've asked me to combine log management with incident detection. I think that is interesting, since I included content on logs in this year's incident detection event. I'd like to preserve the single-track nature of the Summit, but it might be useful to have a few break-outs for people who want to concentrate on a single technology or technique.

I appreciate the blog coverage from Tyler Hudak and Matt Olney so far. Please let me know what you thought of the last event, and if you have any requests for the next one.

Before December 2010, however, I'm looking forward to the SANS What Works in Forensics and Incident Response Summit 2010, 8-9 July 2010, also in DC.

The very next training event for me is my TCP/IP Weapons School 2.0 at Black Hat in DC, 31 Jan - 1 Feb. Regular registration ends 15 January, so sign up while there are still seats left! This class tends to sell out due to the number of defense industry participants in the National Capitol Region.