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2018 ISSA International Conference

by Michael R. Brown on October 29, 2018

This past week I attended the 2018 ISSA International Conference in Atlanta. I’ve attended the last 4 conferences (San Diego, Austin, Chicago, Orlando). There were good and bad points about this year’s conference. I’m not sure where the 2019 conference will be, but hope I can attend it as well.

The day before the conference, I attended the ISSA Chapter Leader Summit as the president of the South Florida Chapter. I’ve attended the prior 4 as well. I was at the conference with 3 other chapter officers, and I know we had 2 others from our chapter in attendance as well.

The Conference hotel was the Westin Peachtree, and we had the Summit there as well as the opening reception and Awards Dinner the night before the conference. The conference itself was held at the nearby Georgia World Congress Center, co-hosted with Cyber Security //Atlanta. We had access to all the presentations of both events, and all the sponsor booths were available to all. This was a different type of conference, as the “rooms” where just curtained off from the exhibit floor, rather then being conference rooms in a hotel. Not sure if I like this sort of setup.

There were several good presentations. I looked forward to the presentation from NIST on their OSCAL project. And one of the keynotes was from Winn Schwartau, who came out with a new interesting book, Analogue Network Security, which I want to get.

There was a Capture the Flag event, but they didn’t do a good job promoting this, so there weren’t a lot of participation.

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For the big “party”, it was held at the World of Coca-Cola. I had been to the original location, so this was my first time to the new location near the Georgia Aquarium. We had access to most of the place, except the “tasting room”. Oh well. It was fun.

There were some problems with the planning of the event, in part due to issues ISSA had with changing their professional management. For some reason, they didn’t reform a conference committee to help plan the event. I had submitted several talk proposals, but never learned if any were accepted. Those will be offered to other conferences.