If You Missed Suits and Spooks NY, Here It Is On Video

O'Reilly Media, the publisher of my book Inside Cyber Warfare, has produced a video compilation of our Suits and Spooks event. I'm proud to say that this is the first non-O'Reilly conference that they have produced for sale and it looks great. It doesn't include every speaker because some of the talks were under Chatham House rules, but here are the speakers that are included:

• The Top 50 Non-state Hacker Groups in the World - Christopher Ahlberg (CEO of RecordedFuture)
• Out of the Mountains: A Future of Feral Cities, Urban Systems Under Stress, and Increasing Overlaps Between the Real and Virtual Worlds - David Kilcullen (CEO of Caerus Associates)
• Emerging Bad Actors in the Virtual and Physical Worlds (Jeffrey Carr, Moderator with Dr. David Kilcullen, Jonathan Hutson, Thomas Dzieran, Aaron Weisburd, Peter Mattis, and John Scott-Railton)
• How to Survive a Surveillance-friendly Environment - Mike Janke (Co-founder, CEO of Silent Circle)
• Should Defensive Strategies be Specific to the Threat Actor or Generalized for all Threat Actors? (Jeffrey Carr, Moderator with Pierre-Marc Bureau (ESET), Derek Manky (Fortinet), Roel Schouwenberg (Kaspersky), Chris Coleman (LookingGlass), Brian Carrier (Basis Technology))
• Real-time Depiction of the Global Cyber Threat Landscape - Chris Coleman
• Icefog: Mercenary Hackers Who Focus on Supply Chain Attacks in Asia - Roel Schouwenberg
• Joseph Kony, the LRA and Elephant Poaching in Africa - Jonathan Hutson

The complete series is only $149. Here's where to order. We're going to be offering this again for Suits and Spooks DC so please let me know what you think.

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SEALs, Spies, Security, and Celebrity: The Suits and Spooks Anti-Conference comes to Los Angeles

George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project documenting the atrocities in Sudan has broken new ground in the use of “soft power” to drive change. Jonathan Hutson from the Enough Project will explain how Clooney and John Prendergast are doing it. Rob DuBois, a retired Navy SEAL, will discuss how and why he advises governments to use “smart power” before hard power. Matt Brazil, a former U.S. embassy commercial officer in Beijing, will show executives how to survive in China without losing all of their secrets. Jim Hake will discuss how NGOs and the U.S. military can work together in the worst problem spots on earth (Afghanistan, Central Asia, Africa).

All of these speakers and more will converge on June 29th in Los Angeles for a private day of frank discussions and problem solving at Taia Global’s third Suits and Spooks Anti-conference, co-sponsored by the Pacific Council on International Policy. The purpose of Suits and Spooks is to bring together individuals from the U.S. intelligence community with innovative thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines to address hard challenges in the national security space.

Attendance is open to the general public but is limited to no more than 120 people. Information and registration is available at SuitsandSpooks.com. Early bird registration ends on May 29, 2012 or once we sell out.

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Reflections on Suits and Spooks DC

It's been one week since the Suits and Spooks DC (SNSDC) event took place and I've made four of the presentations given that day available for download. Not all of the speakers, including me, wanted their information available outside of the protected venue that we offer so for those of you who couldn't make it last week, watch for our upcoming announcement of Suits and Spooks LA this summer. Yes - the next event will be in Los Angeles - probably Santa Monica, to be specific. The exact date and venue is still being explored. but I can tell you that it will be held on a Friday so that, if you're traveling in, you can enjoy the weekend on the beach afterwards.

The general consensus of those attending Suits and Spooks DC was overwhelmingly positive. Dr. Mark Drapeau attended and wrote a review of SNSDC: "Suits and Spooks Rendezvous for the Greater Good". It was my hope that by inviting a multi-disciplinary lineup of speakers that some common themes would emerge, and in fact - that's what happened. One of the points that I made in my opening remarks was that we should re-assess which attacks should be investigated and which should be let go. The FBI and US-CERT are overwhelmed with tracking everything from probes against government networks to DDoS attacks to targeted attacks against the Defense Industrial Base. That's far too much to expect any agency to do let alone ones burdened with budgetary and staffing problems. One of John Robb's 27 Rules was that "it’s better to damage and impair a network than to completely destroy it, because it forces the target to use up more resources for repair." That's what Anonymous is succeeding at doing so brilliantly - using up massive amounts of federal, state and local resources in multiple countries without ever actually destroying anything. Someone needs to conduct a hard target evaluation on whether Anonymous attacks deserve the same importance as the theft of critical data or attacks against critical infrastructure.

While Anup Ghosh gave example after example of how inept our past approaches to information security have been, Dan Geer made an elegant argument for the need harness the world's "unemployed geniuses who are, incidentally, desperate for a job" rather than continue to turn over our security to machines. Jonathan Hutson started off his remarkable presentation on the Satellite Sentinel Project by explaining that the worst question one can ask when faced by a seemingly impossible task is "how can I help?" The passivity of that question doesn't fare well against insurmountable odds. A far better question, Jonathan explained, is "what needs to be done?". Then do it, no matter how impossible the problem looks to be. That's great advice, regardless of the challenge.

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