Highlights from FIC Lille 2023

Lille, the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, known for its historic city center, friendly locals, and Flemish roots, is also the host of the largest European event on digital security and issues surrounding trust. 

FIC (Forum International de la Cybersécurité) brings over 19,000 people to Lille from over 60 countries each year. For the 15th edition, FIC combined an entire cybersecurity and “trusted digital” ecosystem of end customers, service providers, solution providers, consultants, law enforcement, government agencies, schools, and universities. 

Let’s dive into the event and what the CrowdSec team took away from it.

The FIC Program

FIC Lille 2023 saw a great lineup of speakers, starting with the opening ceremony in partnership with Politico who brought General Watin Augouard on stage for a warm welcome as well as European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, who gave the official opening speech. 

Many of the ceremony talks delve into the need for cyber resilience strategies to protect information systems better. The questions asked were, “Are current cyber resilience strategies effective enough? Are they sufficiently adapted to new cyber threats? Can they be strengthened by new standards? Do they need to be better coordinated across countries? In addition, do cyber defense organizations have enough human and technological resources to ensure strong cyber resilience?”.

Also on the program were conferences and live demos put on by the various vendors and professionals present at FIC including CybelAngel, Suez, SentinelOne, Wiz, Elastic, Rubrik, ECSO, and yes, even us! 

From Wednesday to Friday, FIC was packed with insightful presentations, informative masterclasses, and interesting roundtable discussions, and even had a spotlight on new startups making their way into the industry. 

If you are new to FIC, it may be overwhelming to decide where to go and what to see however, the friendliness of the other attendees and how well it is organized by the FIC team make it easy to find your way. 

What were the key takeaways from FIC? 

Participating in this three-day event was energizing for the CrowdSec team. We all left buzzing from the interactions we made not only at our booth but at the conferences and talks. 

It was our third year exhibiting and by far the best thanks to everyone who stopped by to meet and greet us. We were excited by the amount of people who recognized us from the years past but also thanks to our community members who’ve spread the word of CrowdSec to all those who were willing to listen. 

What was even more impressive and even more surprising was the number of people who came to watch our live demo and conference. During the live demo, we had over 100 people join us to watch as our core tech team member, Sebastien Blot, deployed CrowdSec and showed the power of the network effect. After the demo, we had several people stop by the booth to ask more in-depth questions about CrowdSec and to give praise to Sebastien’s presentation. 

Our team was delighted by the results of the event. We spoke with important government officials who understood the importance of collaborative cybersecurity and gave special attention to the efforts we are making. We also had the chance to spark new conversations with old friends and had the pleasure of working with our trusted partners Hexatrust, who were Diamond Partners of FIC this year. 

Of course, the event would not have been as great without our joint cocktail and game with Pr0ph3cy. We had a lot of fun hosting snacks, and drinks, having good conversations at our booths, and giving away some big prizes to all those who participated. 

Overall, the outcome of FIC has been great, so much so that we plan to attend FIC Montréal 2023 in October (our second year attending!). We hope to see you all there!