FloCon 2021 Announces Program on Using Data to Defend
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December 1, 2020—FloCon, the Software Engineering Institute's international conference on data analysis for security, has announced the program for its upcoming event. FloCon 2021 will be held online Tuesday, January 12, through Friday, January 15, and will focus on "Using Data to Defend."
This year's increased level of remote work has changed the threat landscape and the network data available for analysis. FloCon 2021 chair and SEI network defense analyst Joshua Fallon said that it is more important than ever to strengthen the network analyst community through conferences such as FloCon. "Speakers are sharing their experience with tested applications of novel approaches to defending networks and their users," he said.
All FloCon 2021 sessions will be conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Side channels and breakout sessions with speakers will be held via the communications app Discord, which requires an account to use.
Facebook data scientist Lauren Deason will give a keynote presentation on January 12. On January 14, Ambareen Siraj will give a second keynote presentation. Siraj is a professor of computer science at Tennessee Tech University, the founding director of the school's Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Outreach Center, and the founder of the Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) organization, where she is also a board member.
The conference's other 18 speakers and instructors include network security experts from academia, industry, and federally funded research and development centers. Two of the speakers, Angel Kodituwakku and Eboni Thamavong, who gave an SEI webcast in June, will return to present a session called "Improving Analyst Workflow."
Two training sessions, for which continuing education credits may be available, will be offered on January 13. The limited-seating “Introduction to Data Science,” led by CounterFlow AI’s chief data scientist Andrew Fast, will introduce trainees to data science techniques and algorithms using cybersecurity examples and use cases. Josh Stroschein and Peter Manev, both of the Open Information Security Forum, will lead “Intrusion Analysis and Threat Hunting with Open Source Tools.” Trainees will learn how to examine network traffic for evidence of a compromise, deal with new attack forms, and proactively search for evidence of new breaches.
The FloCon 2021 conference concludes on January 15 with a demonstration and poster session and the final set of speakers.
To register for FloCon 2021, visit https://flocon2021.eventbrite.com/. Learn more about the conference at https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/news-events/events/flocon/index.cfm.
