How Hackers Saved My Life

Starting in Security, the motto that got me through was, "It's Okay To Be New." Though I’ll tell you a secret, which is that I didn't always believe it. I was new at Dev, Sec, and even Ops! I felt the motto should have been, "The impostor is strong in this one."

Although the journey has not been easy, the more I learn, the stranger the journey becomes. Why? Because the principles I am learning: visibility, code reuse and yes, even social engineering, helped me see beyond the unknown and find my path. Even more surprising, the help I needed most came from those who we have been taught to fear.

While "How Hackers Saved My Life" may sound like an exaggeration, the truth is that it may be an understatement. Join us as we explore how our lives are a series of functions that we execute in an endless loop. And how you can hack the code for a better life, a better career, and a better community. You don’t have to get unplugged to be Neo.

The 5Ws of CTF

Have you attended a conferences holding a Capture the Flag competition and wondered why someone would spend hours huddled around their computers playing instead of enjoying the conference? Have you considered playing but not sure your skills are up to par or that you would even know how to play? In the 5 Ws of CTF’s we will break things down the way we did in grade school by answering the who, what, when, where and why of CTFs. We may even delve into the sixth and maybe most important “w” how.

A Muggles Guide to Security In The Cloud

In the security and technology world, we rely so heavily on buzz words to explain our work that others feel like we are magicians working spells that they will never be able to do.

Saying, "Due to issues with our security posture, the APT manipulated a well-known CVE to breach our cloud-native-applications." Might as well be: "The Death Eaters were able to use a port key to enter our environment and effectively cast the Avada Kedavra spell."

Instead, we could say, "An attacker used a known flaw to gain access to our environment and brought down our servers."

In this session, we will come to understand that security for our cloud environments can be simple to understand, yes even for muggles. That is, if we focus on the root cause of all cyber attacks: unauthorized spells, wait, I mean unauthorized code.

Beginner / introductory level.

A Wizards Guide to Security in the Cloud

A Horcrux is a powerful object in which a Dark wizard or witch [attacker] has hidden a fragment of his or her soul [code] for the purpose of attaining immortality [persistence].

Creating a Horcrux gives one the ability to anchor their own soul [code] to earth[environment], if the body [process] is destroyed.

In this session, we will come to understand how attackers are able to not only compromise our cloud environments but also maintain persistence—while our security teams are distracted by a mountain of false alerts. If we focus on the root cause of all cyber attacks: unauthorized spells, wait, I mean unauthorized code.

To the Left, To the Left, Dip Baby Drip.

The emergence of the cloud era has resulted in significant changes in the application development process. Traditional monolithic application architectures have given way to more agile cloud-native applications. With this transformation, developers have a greater responsibility to own their code in development and production. However, as DevOps shifting left, the “roll” of security teams begins to dip.

The "Shift Left" movement is believed to ensure that security concerns are considered throughout the entire development process, not just before deployment. However, this transition's success is questionable at best.

Have we shifted too far left?

Join Ell Marquez, Linux and Security Advocate at Intezer, to explore the relationship between development, operations, and security teams. Discussing how increased visibility from development onto runtime can help us all boot scootin’ boogy together.

Is Linux Secure by Default?

The Linux operating system is secure by default because Windows is the most used operating system globally. Thus attackers create viruses and malware to target Windows systems. While cringe-worthy to read, these are all real statements being touted in the technology sector. This is a false narrative that is still frequently touted in the technological world.
This webinar will highlight the common myths proliferated around the Linux operating system. As well as how they are endangering companies' production environments, and steps companies can take to mitigate the new techniques attackers are using to benefit from these myths.

Topics covered:
How recent attacks have shifted to focusing on the Linux ecosystem.
How Linux malware is being crafted and detected.
What you can do to protect yourself from the change in attacker's techniques.