Hola - Greetings From Spain	Posted by Patrik @ 08:17 GMT

I'm in Spain right now attending the annual FIRST conference. I'm not alone, there are 476 attendees from 49 different countries. The majority of people attending the conference work on a security response team which sets the scene for some very interesting discussions.

The presentations here are great, there are six concurrent tracks, and this year they've introduced Geek Zone which is very much hands-on. And to give you an idea of what's going on, today Jacomo Piccolini from CAIS/RNP in Brazil and Francisco Monserrat from IRIS-CERT here in Spain will let everyone play around with IRC based botnets. Right now Robert Hensing from Microsoft CERT is giving a presentation and demo on how targeted attacks based on Office Documents work. More importantly, he's talking about how the new file format used in Office 2007 should help in making Office based attacks more difficult to perform.

Hasta la vista,
Patrik