A fun filled week, moderating, presenting, acting.

Last week was a very busy week for me in the information security arena, which given not that long ago I said I was winding down for the end of the year into Christmas was a little surprising.

On Tuesday I was asked, somewhat last minute, to moderate a panel on Threat Intelligence at the InfoSecurity Leadership Summit. This is not a primary area of interest for me, but given I was moderating the panel and not on the panel itself I felt I had nothing to lose. With about 10 days notice, one short conference call and a rapidly drawn up set of notes the session went very well, although we had a very limited amount of time resulting in no questions from the audience which was disappointing. I do think I achieved my three key objectives for the session though:

Start and finish on time
Keep the panel from drifting off topic
Make the panel look good

Moderating a panel is somewhat less glamorous (if that is the right word) than presenting or being on a panel, but I like the good folks at InfoSecurity so was happy to help out. The experience was useful for me as well, as moderating is very different to being a talking head. The conference itself was also very good, especially given it was the first one the folks at InfoSecurity have done in this space. I look forward to next years.

The day after, on the 4th December I flew to Frankfurt to attend the World Class Mobile Collaboration conference, where I was asked to present an old favourite of mine, An Anatomy of a Risk Assessment. Due to some technical difficulties I had to present an hour before I was scheduled to which somewhat put me on the spot, but actually worked out rather well. I had some great conversations with people in the break afterwards and swapped contact details with a number of them too. It was a very enjoyable but exhausting day though as I had to return that evening to get back to my day job. They kindly recorded the presentation, below:

http://vimeo.com/81118214

And finally, on Friday 6th a Christmas Message video was released that I was involved with in collaboration with Host Unknown and Twist & Shout. I blogged about it on the day but I wanted to mention it again as I do think it is a good example of putting points across in bite sized chunks that are memorable and effective (Twist & Shout are very good at this). There will be some behind the scenes footage being released next week, so look out for it on Twitter and the Host Unknown blog.