Conference Round-up

APWG Counter eCrime Operations Summit II  - Tokyo, Japan - May 26 - 27, 2008
The Anti-Phishing Working Group's meeting in Tokyo was a smashing success, with nearly 300 participants - its largest crowd yet.  The event received wide coverage on Japanese television, with three different film crews and several reporters there.  Rod Rasmussen's presentation with Greg Aaron of Afilias of their comprehensive study on phishing during 2007 made the evening news.  Interestingly, Japan does not have much of a traditional phishing problem targeting financial institutions, but rather a big one with on-line games.  It's a multi-billion dollar industry, and there is great value in obtaining compromised accounts for game play and actual cash-out of cyberworld artifacts in the real world. 

The APWG remains the most collaborative event we attend, and good progress was made in moving forward with industry data sharing.  In the spirit of collaboration, Rod stayed out till dawn learning all about singing Japanese Karaoke with the APWG leadership, people from JPCERT, AusCERT, Korea CERT, LaCaxia, and even the ICANN CTO.  According to Rod, "Terrance Park from Korea CERT was the only one who could actually sing at all, so it was certainly a collaborative effort to employ counter-measures (alcohol) to protect from a full assault on our network interfaces (ears)!"