“What is the collective noun for such an enormous grouping of TV cameras?” That is the first thought that came to mind as I turned the corner and found the USA news teams between me and the Westin Hotel, Alexandria VA, where the 2018 NSF Cybersecurity Summit was to be held. As I crossed the square I then noticed that the many bright lights and cameras were all pointed at large numbers of smartly dressed TV reporters all of whom were doing live pieces to camera for direct transmission to the USA news channels and breakfast TV shows. Wow! I knew we had an exciting agenda for our WISE workshop but why was there so much interest? More on that later!
Luckily, all was peaceful inside the hotel and the WISE Community was very pleased to have a very successful day discussing the topics chosen for the day:
- Operational Security threat intelligence and communication (SOCs)
- SCI working group (Policy Development Kit, Baseline AUP and EU GDPR)
- Security challenges for high-throughput data transfers
More than 20 people attended during the day, some of those being long-standing members of the community but importantly joined by a significant number of people attending for the first time.
Full details of the agenda together with slides shown are available at:
https://wiki.geant.org/display/WISE/WISE+@+NSF+CyberSecurity+Summit+2018
Many very useful and animated discussions were held and highlights included:
- General agreement that closer collaboration between WISE and TrustedCI on best practices and policies would be good
- Encouragement of closer collaboration between Europe and USA on SOCs and the sharing of threat intelligence, specifically using MISP
- The SCI-WG in addition to its new baseline AUP (for which there was good support) should also consider producing a second document describing what components should be included in such an AUP without specifying the exact words to be used
- Lots of interest in the WISE/AARC2 work on policy development kits, especially as they relate to EU GDPR Data Privacy Policy templates
- Strong support for the new working group on security in high throughput data transfers. There are lots of issues to consider and some potential volunteers to join the group have been identified
On behalf of the WISE Steering Committee I say a big thank you to TrustedCI, to the Program Committee and to the organisers of the 2018 NSF Cybersecurity Summit for inviting us to hold our one-day workshop. Thanks are also due to all the presenters and last, but by no means least, to all attendees for lots of very useful discussion.
Oh, and what about the enormous Press interest outside? There was of course a perfectly good explanation and unfortunately nothing to do with our WISE meeting! Across the square from the hotel is the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where the case of “United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort Jr.” was being tried. During the afternoon of our workshop the Jury returned to deliver guilty verdicts on 8 counts of tax and bank fraud. Later that day, all cameras and reporters left and the rest of the NSF Summit was allowed to continue in peace.
David Kelsey (STFC UK Research and Innovation) – Chair of WISE Steering Committee