AusCERT’s achievements over the past 3 decades is replete with significant national and international milestones.  For a small, lightly-funded organisation in it’s formative years, AusCERT appeared often on the world’s stage due to its innovative and fearless work in the fields of national cyber security incident response, vulnerability mitigation and international coordination and collaboration.  AusCERT fostered early relations between teams throughout Asia Pacific, the US and Europe. AusCERT nurtured the formation of cyber teams in commercial, education and government sectors in both Australia and internationally, sponsored teams into international communities such as FIRST (Forum of Incident Response Security Teams) and APCERT (Asia-Pacific CERT) and assisted banking and law enforcement in fighting cybercrime with several ground-breaking initiatives including (but not limited to) the first Australian-based banking trojan-site take-down service, anonymised sharing of technical information between international law enforcement agencies.

AusCERT treated its constituents and colleagues to several innovative services including: a national aggregated network log-parsing service able to provide threat information and early warnings of malicious activity, cybersecurity training for  Australian law enforcement, training in incident response team formation for international organisations, and the longest running international Australian cybersecurity conference.

This session will highlight AusCERT’s astonishing achievements over the first decade or so of its life in an entertaining format including the appearance of special guests from AusCERT’s formative past.

This presentation will provide illustrations of how AusCERT helped to mature the global community of incident response teams, raise awareness of cybersecurity throughout Australia, act as a liaison between national and international law enforcement, government and the private sector, provide the first national incident response capability for Australia and work closely with IT product vendors in detecting and mitigating exploitable vulnerabilities across multiple platforms and forums.

This session will provide attendees with a rare insight into some of the detail of how AusCERT’s early work laid the foundation for both an Australian national and international cybersecurity capability, a tradition that AusCERT has continued to this day as an exemplar to the international cybersecurity professional community.