As most of you already know, yesterday I was involved in the SANS Toronto 2008 keynote along with Rob Lee, Bryce Galbraith, Peter Giannoulis, Dave Shackleford, Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Stephen Sims, and Guy Bruneau. This was the first keynote that I had the pleasure to be involved with but I hope it won’t be the last.

We had a full room with a mix of local and out of town students, all of whom were having a blast. “How do you know they were having a blast” you might ask? Even though we were talking about serious topics pertaining to security, my fellow panelists and I had the entire room laughing like crazy. In fact, I think I saw a few people whipping away tears from laughing too hard.

I think everyone had a good time, myself included, and the thing that set this keynote apart from previous keynotes that I’ve seen is how laid back and fun the talk was. There were questions about social media and the validation of identities, acceptance and rate of deployment for mainstream wireless infrastructure, the shaping of traffic to prevent P2P transmissions, and several others. All of the panelists were able to add their insight into the posed questions and I think the crowd appreciated how frank we were in our responses.

I think they also enjoyed the running joke about including www.theacademy.ca, in one way or another, in almost all of our responses. It was one of those “you had to be there” jokes but, trust me, it was hilarious. I didn’t get a chance to see the reviews filled out by the students but I hope they enjoyed the session as much as we all enjoyed presenting it.

Maybe SANS will let us do it again some time.