The year 2024 marks Suricata’s 10th SuriCon! While November doesn’t arrive, let’s look back at SuriCon’s origins and history, and revisit some key moments and talks from previous years.
Our first SuriCon happened in 2015, in Barcelona, Spain. A realization by our President and Executive Director, Kelley Misata, PhD, who saw how important it would be to bring together all Suricata fans, integrators, and users to discuss, share innovations, and help build our project’s roadmap. Our community conference, when the team and contributors could all be together, sharing our enthusiasm for Suricata and Information Security technologies. In the two-day event, we had over 100 attendees. Some topics from the more than 10 talks were SELKS; how Mozilla was using Suricata; and software-based acceleration.
Warmed by this first year, SuriCons became part of OISF. The next editions were:
- In Washington, DC, USA (2016): more than 140 Suri fans joined for 2.5 days and more than 20 talks – and the community asked that 2017 was three full days! This year, Pierre Chiefflier presented Securing Security Tools, in which he proposed that Suricata parsers used Rust as a more secure coding language;
- In Prague, Czech Republic (2017): 170+ attendees gathered for 3 days, for our brainstorming/roadmap discussion, 15+ talks, and even a sponsors’ reception. Among the presentations, Anthony Tellez, from Splunk, spoke about Hunting BotNets: Advanced Security Analytics with Suricata;
- In Vancouver, Canada (2018) – we celebrated 10 years of Suricata with more than 160 attendees! From the many cool talks, including detection and TLS and Suricata with load-balanced networks, we had Chris Wakelin, PhD, from Emerging Threats, present Moonstruck: Using Lua for Detection and Malware Traffic Decoding;
- In Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019), we saw a blooming 210 folks join, from more than 24 countries! Amongst the 20+ presentations, Tatyana Shishkova, from Kaspersky, shared her expertise on using Suricata for Malware Classification;
- Due to the pandemic, we joined virtually for 2020 and our community roadmap sessions;
- We opted for a hybrid event as we met in Boston, USA, in 2021. 170+ attendees! For our CtF challenge, 51 people competed for the grand prize by OPNsense. Of the 20 talks, two were about Suricata and DPDK, including Lukas Sismis’ Accelerating Suricata with DPDK Prefilters;
- More than 140 folks met in 2022 in Athens, with speaker gifts from a nonprofit that provides opportunities for people experiencing homelessness (Shedia), and almost 20 talks. We were happy to see some past Outreachy alumnae on stage, and a Log4Shell Case Study where Brandon Devault showed how to use Suricata for Incident Response;
- Last year, 2023, while the team was gathered in Stockholm, we opted for a smaller and virtual version of SuriCon. We had the traditional community brainstorm, and OISF and Suricata updates – so we could focus our energy on bringing all fans together again for SuriCon’s 10-year’s celebration.
This brings us to 2024, and why it’s so special to us. With all different formats and places, in one way or another, we always find time for the Suricata team to be together with our community. And this is our 10th community conference – A big achievement!
OISF may be a small team, but Suricata has a great expanded universe, and without our passionate users, contributors, integrators, and our Consortium members and sponsors, not only none of this would be possible – it would not make sense either, nor would Suricata be where it is.
We always say that we learn from the community – you bring the use cases, you share your threat analysis and rule writers’ expertise, you share your views: and we discuss and implement together. And the SuriCon talks and brainstorming sessions are a big part of this. As we approach the last weeks of our open Call for Talks for SuriCon 2024, we invite you to be inspired by how some of the past presentations and suggestions by contributors helped shape Suricata’s roadmap and core functionalities and share your innovative ideas with us in Madrid!
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