I’ve spoken at around two dozen ISACA events over the last few years, and this year’s was one of the best.  They had great presentations with a wide variety of topics, from COBIT to, well, information warfare. But what I liked most was the international and eclectic nature of the audience. There were folks from around the globe representing different roles such as auditors, security analysts, researchers, and more.

I was also able to share some of my perspectives around emerging markets with the audience. Fortunately, this conference attracts so many international participants that I was able to have bi-directional discussions with the crowd and go into quite a bit of detail about countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand. There was a lot of interest in how governments in emerging markets view information warfare – what they are investing in, and how they are building an offensive and defensive strategy.

We covered a wide variety of geographies, actors and attack vectors, and I demoed one or two attacks to illustrate how some of these nation-states are leveraging tools and techniques that are equally popular for cyber criminals with financial instead of political motivations. All in all, the conference was a great experience, and I’ll be sure to keep them on my radar for presenting again.