Security Smackdown

Last week at the RSA Conference, I had the privilege of hosting The Security Smackdown — three events in one meant to both educate and entertain the 15,000+ attendees of the conference. The three parts of the event were:

1. The Ultimate Testing Challenge where attendees are encouraged to come test their web appsecurity skills by finding security vulnerabilities in BigSafeBank.com, a fictitious website created by Security Innovation. There was a security expert on site to help guide those who needed some assistance.
2. The Security Smackdown Undercard, a trivia game show where twice daily participants could win very cool t-shirts by answering security trivia questions. Check out the t-shirt
3. The Grand Finale — this was the highlight of the entire week for me!  In this “Around the Horn” format, I asked three security industry gurus (Mary Ann Davidson of Oracle, John Stewart of Cisco, and Charles Kolodgy of IDC) to comment on 15 topics. The audience decided who got the point for each topic (points were also awarded interstitially for witty comments, good humor, and on one occasion good vocabulary.)

Davidson, Stewart, and Kolodgy were hysterical and all three commented to me afterwards that it was the most fun they’d had at a conference in years. I wish other conferences would learn from this and introduce daring and fresh events like this. The crowd loved it, the featured stars loved it, and the conference organizers loved it.

RSA and several media outlets reported on it — you can see the RSA Show Daily entry for it (see the caricature half-way down the page on) and you can view a larger image of the promotional poster here:  http://www.securityinnovation.com/group.gif

Other conferences should learn from this and introduce daring and fresh events like the Security Smackdown… oh, did I mention that already?  ~;^)