In a few weeks' time I will present my favourite talk, Web Intrusion Detection with ModSecurity, at the ApacheCon US 2008 in New Orleans:
Intrusion detection is a well-known network security technique--it introduces monitoring and correlation devices to networks, enabling administrators to monitor events and detect attacks and anomalies in real-time. Web intrusion detection does the same but it works on the HTTP level, making it suitable to deal with security issues in web applications. This session will start with an overview of web intrusion detection and web application firewalls, discussing where they belong in the overall protection strategy. The second part of the talk will discuss ModSecurity and its capabilities. ModSecurity is an open source web application firewall that can be deployed either embedded (in the Apache HTTP server) or as a network gateway (as part of a reverse proxy deployment). Now in it's sixth year of development, ModSecurity is mature, robust and flexible. Due to its popularity and wide usage it is now positioned as a de-facto standard in the web intrusion detection space.
This is the same talk I presented at ApacheCon Europe 2008 in Amsterdam and the OWASP AppSec US 2008 conference in New York, and it's getting better every time I do it. This is going to be my first ApacheCon in the US and I am really looking forward to it. It's the place to be if you are involved in any way with the projects of the Apache Software Foundation.