Organized by Torrid Networks’ founder, Dhruv Soi, Securitybyte & OWASP AppSec Asia Conference 2009, India’s largest security conference, opened its doors today at the magnificent Hotel Crowne Plaza in Gurgaon, National Capital Region, India. Gurgaon is one of the most prominent outsourcing and offshoring hubs in the world and houses regional headquarters of many multinational companies. It has also been proclaimed the best city in India to live and work according to a recent survey by Business Today magazine.Last year, Dhruv Soi, Chair – OWASP India, organized the application security centric OWASP conference at a slightly smaller scale. This year, he wanted to cover more than just Web application security, so he ideated Securitybyte and brought a more diverse range of security subject and issues. He also plans to make this a yearly event, since the interest for this kind of topics is great.

Around 400+ participants are expected to attend this 4 days event where world renowned InfoSec speakers are going to deliver the talks and trainings. The first two days are dedicated to conference, while on Thursday and Friday trainings will take place.The event was supposed to be inaugurated by Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, former President of India, and Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, Chief of Integrated Defence Staff at the Indian Ministry of Defence, but the former unfortunately had to cancel his appearance at the last moment due to scheduling conflicts.Opening keynotes were also held by Howard Schmidt (former special advisor – Cyberspace Security for the White House), John Bumgarner (Research Director and CTO – U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit) and Hord Tipton (ED – ISC2, ex-CIO US Department of the Interior).

The sessions are organized in three tracks:

The first is dedicated to security researchers and enthusiasts – the topics are mostly very technical and range from new functions in the new version of Xprobe3 by Fyodor Yarochkin of Guard-info, to active man-in-the-middle attacks by Adi Sharabani of IBM.

The second track is aimed at security auditors, developers and Q&A teams architects, and includes topics such as “How To Blackbox Test Almost Anything” by Aviram Jenik of Beyond Security.

The third track is directed at leaders, managers and C&S professionals, and comprised an address by Mano Paul, Software Assurance Advisor at (ISC)2 and a very interesting lecture by Howard Schmidt about the international state of cyber security.

There is also Packet Wars competition – a digital cyberwar that saw the participants of the conference organizing attacks aimed at specific (local) computer targets.

There were also some exhibition booths set up on the lawn – belonging to SANS, (ISC)2, and a couple of other sponsors – including the local distributors for Armorize, and the Indian company Bandvalley Technologies (the manufacturers of SniperIT, a user based Client-Server Data security and monitoring system).

The end of the first day of the conference was marked by the India Technology Leadership Summit 2009, an exclusive, invitation-only summit about “Information Security Concerns for Offshoring”. Event was inaugurated by Mr. Ashwani Kumar, Director – Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India.