Keynote (Thursday)

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Christian Folini will be opening Insomni’hack 2023 as Thursday’s keynote speaker.

Does that sound familiar? Well, indeed, this will be Christian’s third keynote in a row at Insomni’hack … with a slight twist: he previously stepped in at the last minute following some other speaker’s cancellation.

Not only was he kind enough to help us – twice – with these last-minute hiccups but, and most importantly, he delivered amazing talks whose brilliant mix of relevant information and personal style was very appreciated by Insomni’hack’s audience. So much so that we were frequently reminded of “the keynote speaker with the medieval helmet” for some time after the first one.

After that, inviting him to be this year’s “official” keynote speaker seemed like the obvious choice and we definitely are looking forward to his opening talk.

If, despite his Swiss and international notoriety, you are not familiar with Christian yet, here’s a quick biography:

Christian Folini is a security engineer, an open source enthusiast and serial keynote speaker. He holds a PhD in medieval history and took that interest to new heights with the actual defense of castles across Europe. But life goes on and castles tend to be very cold, namely in Winter times. So he turned to defending web servers, which he finds equally challenging. He brings 15 years of experience with ModSecurity configuration in high security environments, DDoS defense and threat modeling.

Christian Folini is the author of the second edition of the ModSecurity Handbook and the best known teacher on the subject. He co-leads the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set project and serves as the program chair of the “Swiss Cyber Storm” conference. During the years, he made a name of himself as somebody wo managed to piss off the No-E-Voting as well as the Pro-E-Voting crowd, which he takes as proof of a well-balanced and typically Swiss position.

In 2023 he attempts his third InsomniHack keynote in a row with a presentation that is set to vex his supporters and put future sponsoring of his own open source project as well as the conference at risk.

We just hope that he doesn’t have any last-minute impediment because we wouldn’t know who to call…