Antispyware Coalition Meeting in Ottawa

Eric and I attended the Antispyware Coalition Meeting and Workshop last week. It was a good opportunity to meet with many of our peers in the industry as well as a very pleasant trip overall. Ottawa, where the event was held, is a great city and in addition to everything else the trip afforded us the opportunity to enjoy some great native cuisine of the region. A common theme which ran between both the meeting and the workshop was the idea of sharing of intelligence. In the meeting we discussed a proposal based on ideas Eric suggested last month centering around the sharing of threat URLs between anti-spyware providers with a goal of improving capabilities across the industry.  The concept was endorsed and presented at the meeting by Symantec and ICSA Labs and seemed to be very well received. There are still a lot of things to be worked out but I'm excited about this kind of industry cooperation. 

In the workshop I had the opportunity to present as part of a panel on the topic of Public and Private Cooperation. On the panel with me was Joe Jarzombek, Director of Software Assurance at the US Department of Homeland Security as well as Christine Owen of Webroot and we were moderated by Neil Schwartzman of CAUCE Canada. Some of the points that Joe raised when discussing the mission of DHS with regard to protection of the Internet reinforced for me the importance of broad and deep industry collaboration when dealing with threats such as spyware and other malicious code. Other sessions at the workshop covered the various harms caused by spyware, where spyware comes from, legislative solutions and driving awareness of risks within both the consumer and enterprise spaces. Even better than the sessions were the many conversations and ideas shared between member attendees on a range of topics both technical and social relating to how we can all combat these various threats better.

-Jeff