ModSecurity Is Blooming

OWASP AppSec Europe 2008 in Ghent, which I wrote about in a previous post, indeed felt like a ModSecurity user meeting. We kicked-off the conference with 2 days of ModSecurity training, with 8 people attending. Eight is not only the perfect number of attendees for a class (you get enough time to speak properly with everyone), but also a great number in terms of interest in ModSecurity. Our traditional party was very popular (Breach Security always throws an OWASP party on the last training day), and I had the pleasure of speaking to many ModSecurity users. But the truly great thing was that I didn't have to explain to anyone what ModSecurity was--everybody knew! Admittedly, it's a self-selected group of people, but it's an achievement nevertheless. It means that we've made yet another step forward.

Above everything else, it is becoming increasingly evident that there's an emerging group of ModSecurity power users, who are either running their own projects related to ModSecurity, or stretching, in their deployments, what ModSecurity can do. I've had the fortune of talking to three such users at the conference (in no particular order): Christian Folini (REMO), Christian Bockermann (JWall) and Marc Stern.