The ISOI task force is meeting in Washington DC on August 27th and 28th. You may have heard of us back in January when the press reported a super-secret meeting at Microsoft! Nice headlines, but the secret was on a public web site :) This is a group of individuals from a variety of companies, as well as education and government bodies who are working together to fight bots, phishing, and other internet scourges that threaten businesses and users alike. ISOI is rather unique in that those of us who participate generally do so as individuals, rather than representatives of the companies we work for. To be sure, many of our companies are fully supportive of our participation, but that’s where it ends. Information that a security company might potentially be able to use for competitive advantage is shared because ISOI is looking for tactical advantage over the bad guys... that is our goal.

We meet twice a year, but communicate year round with each other to try to take down phishing sites, botnets, compromised web sites, and share intelligence that can be used by the security community. Much of the content of the meetings will be confidential, but I’ll post some blogs while I am at the meeting and share what I can.

I would be remiss not to thank the folks sponsoring the meeting this time.

Afilias Ltd, ICANN, The Internet Society, Shinkuro, Inc., and Sunbelt Software.

And thanks to the many companies, who like my employer, are footing the bill for their researchers to take part in this event.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for the antivirus company ESET LLC