Earlier this week, the IT-security conference Area41 took place at Komplex457 in Zürich. It was a direct successor to the very successful Hashdays which had previously been held in the Raddison Blu in Luzern for three year. The organizers of the event remained largely the same and so it came that visitors also got to experience an outstanding conference, that can easily compete with conferences that are held in other countries.

The lineup of speakers as well as the talks they held were of very good quality. The speakers gave insight into various aspects of current research and shared knowledge gained during years of experience. The talks were entertaining, informative and ultimately held something for everyone.

Among others, I held a talk that covered the topic of Vulnerability Management during which I talked about our Vulnerability Database. The talk covered its possibilities and the difficulties cataloguing vulnerabilities. The slidedeck is available for download. The feedback I received after the talk was very interesting and I had quite some good conversations on the subject. This will most definitely have an impact on the future of the VulDB.

I would like to personally thank the organizing team for their hard work and the amazingly well-organized convention as well as the exceptionally good event. Speakers as well as visitors were taken care of and could enjoy the entire convention. I will definitely be back next year. I’m looking forward to it.

About the Author

Marc Ruef has been working in information security since the late 1990s. He is well-known for his many publications and books. The last one called The Art of Penetration Testing is discussing security testing in detail. He is a lecturer at several faculties, like ETH, HWZ, HSLU and IKF. (ORCID 0000-0002-1328-6357)

Links

• http://area41.io
• http://www.komplex457.ch
• https://vuldb.com
• https://www.scip.ch/publikationen/praesentationen/scip_area41-2014_vuldb.pdf