Software Engineering Institute

October 4, 2023—FloCon, the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI’s) annual conference on using collected data to defend enterprise networks, recently announced the program for its 2024 event and opened registration. FloCon 2024 will take place January 9-11, 2024, in Mobile, Alabama.

Security and data analysis professionals will gather for presentations on improving network security by analyzing a variety of data, supported by innovative machine learning (ML), hardware, and network storage. Confirmed presentation topics include

• empowering cyber operators with enhanced cyber threat intelligence pipelines
• forensic and measurement netflow
• real-time problem solving with anomaly detection
• fusing AWS VPC flow logs and traditional netflow
• rapidly responsive domain blocking
• supporting machine-learning-based security solutions
• bypassing next-generation two-factor and multifactor authentication
• blocklist co-occurrence analysis for large-scale IP network traffic flows
• sentiment behavior analytics

Watch the FloCon website for updates to the conference agenda.

“As attack patterns evolve and systems are more deeply interconnected than ever, network defenders are turning to broader sources and combinations of monitoring data to develop situational awareness for network security,” said Joshua Fallon, senior network defense analyst in the SEI’s CERT Division and conference chair.

Colonel Billy E. Pope, Jr., commander of the 81st Training Wing at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, will give the conference’s keynote presentation. Col. Pope commands 12,000 people and is responsible for the technical training of officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians of the U.S. Air Force, Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve as well as other Department of Defense agencies, in addition to international students.

FloCon attendees can also learn valuable skills in two training workshops. In the first workshop, the SEI CERT Division’s Clarence Worrell and Tim Shimeall will teach “NetFlow Data Cleaning and Feature Engineering,” or how to process network flow data to meet the requirements of modeling methods applied in artificial intelligence (AI), ML, and other analysis approaches. In the second workshop, “Jupyter in Security: Applying Data Science Tools for Analyzing Suricata EVE,” the Open Information Security Foundation’s Peter Manev will explore how to how to apply situational cybersecurity knowledge to ML more effectively.

Though the submission period for FloCon 2024 has closed, speaking opportunities and sponsorships may still be available. For more information, email the conference organizers at flocontact@cert.org. See the conference agenda, register to attend, and more on the FloCon 2024 website.