I just came back from the Electronic Crimes Task Force quarterly conference, held at the Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco. This was my first ECTF conference, so I didn’t know what to expect, and right away I felt underdressed because everyone was in suits. I met some interesting ‘suits’ during this conference, from DEA and USSS to local police.

The four talks during this conference didn’t give me any new information, but I did learn more about the ECTF and the role of the USSS. I had a nice chat with a Wells Fargo employee that was part of the intrusion detection team. He told me that his job is really boring because the ids is tuned so well, that they catch ‘bad guys’ within minutes. They use realsecure for HIDS, but I forgot to ask how they correlate the data, and whether they have central ids management for all banks or per a number of banks/district/etc.

I also had a small chat with four DEA agents, and they told me about a recent case that involved a Canadian pharmacy company, and how my employer helped. Another person I talked to was from my local county sheriff’s department, in the computer crimes division. He said that there was only one other person to help him with computer crimes, and how they are totally overworked. He also mentioned that my city will be out of contract with them next year. I wonder if my city will be opening up their own computer crimes unit, as I would be interested in helping out if they were.