APCERT Annual General Meeting & Conference 2016 in Tokyo and JPCERT/CC’s 20th Anniversary
Hi all, this is Yuka from Global Coordination Division and also serving as APCERT Secretariat.
We are happy to announce that we have just finished one of the big tasks for this year – the host of APCERT Annual General Meeting & Conference 2016, which was held on 24-27 October at Royal Park Hotel in Tokyo. After the official establishment of APCERT in 2003, its annual conference had never been held in Tokyo. There was, though, a meeting in 2002 as Asia Pacific Security Incident Response Coordination Conference (APSIRC; the predecessor of APCERT) where forming a community for CSIRTs in the Asia Pacific region was discussed. Strangely enough, the Conference in 2002 was also held in the same hotel – we actually booked the venue without knowing the fact. We were so thrilled to know about the chance.
The Conference was run for four days:
24 Oct: Working Group Meetings, Team Building, Welcome Cocktail
25 Oct: TSUBAME Workshop, CyberGreen Workshop, Steering Committee Meeting
26 Oct: Closed Conference, Annual General Meeting, Gala Dinner
27 Oct: Open Conference
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From Day 1 through to 3, sessions for APCERT members and invited guests were conducted, and Day 4 was an open session including the general public. Altogether we had APCERT Operational Members from 23 teams of 18 economies in Asia Pacific, Supporting Members, global partners, sponsors and some local guests – which counted up to approximately 200 people. The Conference was themed “Borderless Cooperation, Seamless Action – Towards a Cleaner, Greener Cyber Space –“, which indeed reflects the aim of this community. The Conference program on the 27th was arranged based on “Call For Papers”, with presentations which covered a wide range of topics on recent technical trends and concluded with a panel discussion on CSIRT operations as below.
- IoT Threat and IoT Botnet
- Protecting CNII against Malware Threats: A Coherent Response through Cooperation Amongst OIC Countries
- APT Campaign Targets Japanese Critical Infrastructure
- Ransomware Tracking and AP Region Footprint
- Who’s That Knocking on My Back Door: A Jboss Case
- Sophisticated Financial Fraud Malware (Mobile) in Korea
- Collaborative Research for Development of CSIRTs in Vietnam
- Best Practices and Common Missteps in Responding to Major Incidents
- Engaging the ISPs in Effective National Network Abuse Handling
(Programs available here: https://www.apcert.org/apcert2016/program.html)
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What made this event special was not only the fact that it was hosted in Tokyo for the first time as APCERT, but also that it coincided with the 20th anniversary for JPCERT/CC.
Being established in October 1996, as one of the oldest CSIRTs in the world, JPCERT/CC has been contributing in creating a safer cyber security environment both in Japan and across the globe. To look back over the activities from internal and external perspectives, a symposium was held on 28 October inviting local partners. The symposium contained presentations from JPCERT/CC staff and partners providing the history of activities and ideas for future plans, which was followed by a social cocktail.
What these two events brought us is the fact that JPCERT/CC has been supported by various partners locally and globally. For the anniversary event, some of our foreign counterpart organisations kindly sent us video messages with the words of celebration. From local communities, we received feedbacks about our activities, some positive evaluations and also encouragement. Indeed, since JPCERT/CC is a “Coordination Center”, our activities require coordination with various entities, and creating a safer cyber space cannot be accomplished without the support of such local and global partners. We hope that both events were good opportunities to show our gratitude for the special partnership for the past 20 years, and we look forward to continuing and developing the relationship for the next 10 years and more.
Thanks for reading.
- Yukako Uchida
