AusCERT prepares for biggest ever conference
Australia's best-known security conference will open for business on Monday and organisers say this year's event should be the biggest ever.
Graham Ingram, general manager of AusCERT, told ZDNet Australia last week that the organisation was considering shutting down registrations because the event was nearing capacity.
"The numbers are limited -- we won't let it go past a certain number and there is a good chance we are going to close off registrations. In terms of the content, the type of delegates we are getting, and what we intend to produce at the conference, it is bigger," said Ingram.
The conference will open with a keynote from Nick Tate, the director, Information Technology Services and AusCERT. He will be followed by Ivan Krstić, who is a software architect from the One Laptop Per Child project. Krstić will explain some of the problems faced by his team when trying to secure 100 million identical computers.
Other speakers include Oracle's chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson, Jeff Wright from the US Department of Homeland Security, Johannes Ullrich from the SANS Internet Storm Centre.
On the second day, delegates will hear from Howard A Schmidt, who retired from the White House in 2003 after serving as vice-chair of President Bush's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and as the special adviser for Cyberspace Security for the White House in December 2001.
The conference will wind down on Wednesday afternoon with a presentation from the controversial Richard Thieme, who also spoke at last year's event. Thieme is well known for speaking his mind on industry issues.
AusCERT's Ingram said that registrations for this year's conference indicate that delegates will be from a more senior level than was the case in previous years. He said the event has also attracted an increasing number of international visitors.
"Delegates are saying that this is one of the international security conferences that people need to attend. There is more international participation and more countries are sending people," said Ingram.