After nine days of intensive teamwork, GeekWeek has wrapped up its most successful edition yet. On behalf of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (the Cyber Centre), I want to thank all participants and their organizations for dedicating time to collaborate on complex problems that affect the entire cyber security landscape.
We had 222 participants from six different countries, representing more than 80 organizations across government, the private sector and academia. This made this GeekWeek the biggest year yet. The level of effort and participation shown by these organizations clearly demonstrated the passion the cyber security community has for increasing cyber security around the globe.
I was always confident that GeekWeek 6’s five main teams would produce excellent work and live up to the high standards Canadians can expect from the Cyber Centre. They did not disappoint! These teams knew their assigned projects would be complex and challenging (which you can read about here). But the strength and diversity of each individual participant came through, enabling each team to achieve greater results via GeekWeek collaboration than would have been possible through individual efforts alone.
GeekWeek’s closing ceremonies saw each team outline their work to their peers and executives from their respective organizations. These presentations highlighted important breakthroughs, such as:
- Developing accessible tools and analytics that would increase the cyber security of not just Canadian organizations, but also of Canadian citizens on the internet
- Automating cyber threat analysis with a focus on discovering threats to Linux operating systems and the analysis of memory-based malware
- Decoding and identifying malicious cyber infrastructure around the globe
- Increasing our ability to understand and discover cyber threats through the application of advanced analytic techniques, such as machine learning
- Illustrating the synergies possible through public and private analytic collaboration to better assist law enforcement in dealing with cyberthreats
- Leveraging and contributing to community tools in order to make cyber security solutions more accessible
There was certainly no shortage of fantastic results, but certainly the most outstanding result of all was the pervasive spirit of collaboration, the sharing of knowledge across participants and the amazing relationships built throughout the event.
But cyber threats never take a break. So while GeekWeek is done for another year, our dedicated teams at the Cyber Centre will continue to build on the joint efforts of GeekWeek 6 to continue protecting Canada and all Canadians.
Thank you once again, and look forward to seeing you at GeekWeek 7!
Rajiv Gupta
Director General, Cyber Defence Capabilities