Travel to industry events can be difficult and out of reach of many budgets. And SCADA security research is going on around the world. So in the inaugural SCADA Security Scientific Symposium (S4) in Jan 2007 we offered a Virtual Attendee option. Virtual Attendees had a 3 pane display with live video, presentation slides, and chat/Q&A available.

We had people from Asia, Europe, South America, Middle East and all over North America participating as Virtual Attendees. After the event we asked them about the experience. They had glowing commments and wanted to participate virtually again in 2008. Some had the virtual program running in a conference room with a crowd watching the papers they were most interested in. Technically it was a big hit.

Financially it was a flop as I blogged after the event. We ended up losing about $20K on the Virtual Attendee option. While S4 is not designed to be a cash cow, we hope to break even.

We really wanted to offer the Virtual Attendee program again in S4 2008, and anticipating huge growth in Virtual Attendees was overly optimistic. So we decided to address the shortfall by having one sponsor for each day of S4.

I’m very proud to announce that OSIsoft is the Day 2 Sponsor of S4.

OSIsoft has expressed a lot of interest in control system security research after the San Diego PCSF meeting in June 2006. We looked for opportunities to integrate them into our research projects since their PI has such a big footprint in electric and oil/gas. Fortunately our recent DoE research contract has a large component that involves turning existing PI systems into a SCADA security event manager using OSIsoft’s ACE as well as generalizing the results for other historians. See the project narrative.

Now they have sponsored Day Two of S4 2008 which shows their continued interest in moving forward the cause of SCADA security. I know. I’m gushing, but they have been very open to any way to help improve security in control systems. In fact, on the DoE project they keep hitting us up on what else they can do to help.

Day One sponsorship is still open for one full day sponsor, $7,500, or two half-day sponsors, $3,750. We have some people looking at it, but no firm PO yet. The benefits of sponsorship are available at the end of the S4 Program Document, send any questions to s4@digitalbond.com. The biggest benefit is everyone at the event, physical and virtual, will know the sponsor made the Virtual Attendee program possible.