Category Archives: Events

PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era

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Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about the Positive Hack Days 11 conference, which took place on May 18 and 19 in Moscow. As usual, I want to express my personal opinion about this event.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239091

As I did last year, I want to start talking about this conference with a few words about the sanctions. US sanctions against Positive Technologies, the organizers of Positive Hack Days, were introduced a year ago. At that time it seemed very serious and extraordinary. But today, when our country has become the most sanctioned country in the world, those sanctions against Positive Technologies seem very ordinary and unimportant. In fact, it even seems to benefit the company somehow.

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AM Live Vulnerability Management Conference 2022: my impressions and position

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Hello everyone! This episode will be about the AM Live Vulnerability Management online conference. I participated in it on May 17th.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239090

The event lasted 2 hours. Repeating everything that has been said is difficult and makes little sense. Those who want can watch the full video or read the article about the event (both in Russian). Here I would like to share my impressions, compare this event with last year’s and express my position.

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Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code

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Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf 22 Vulnerability Management conference, vmconf.pw. I will be talking about malicious open source and the cost of using someone else’s code.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239086
Video in Russian from CISO Forum 2022: https://youtu.be/LPXg-MEamVA

To be honest, at the beginning of the year I did not plan to talk about these things. But life changes rapidly and unpredictably, so it becomes impossible not to talk about this.

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CISO Forum 2022: the first major Russian security conference in the New Reality

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Hello everyone! After a two-year break, I took part in Moscow CISO Forum 2022 with a small talk “Malicious open source: the cost of using someone else’s code”.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239084

CISO Forum is the first major Russian conference since the beginning of The New Reality of Information Security (TNRoIS). My presentation was just on this topic. How malicious commits in open source projects change development and operations processes. I will make a separate video about this (upd. added Malicious Open Source: the cost of using someone else’s code). In this episode, I would like to tell you a little about the conference itself.

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VMconf 22: Blindspots in the Knowledge Bases of Vulnerability Scanners

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Hello everyone! This video was recorded for the VMconf22 Vulnerability Management conference. I want to talk about the blind spots in the knowledge bases of Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management products.

This report was presented in Russian at Tenable Security Day 2022. The video is here.

Potential customers rarely worry about the completeness of the Knowledge Base when choosing a Vulnerability Scanner. They usually trust the VM vendors’ claims of the “largest vulnerability base” and the total number of detection plugins. But in fact the completeness is very important. All high-level vulnerability prioritization features are meaningless unless the vulnerability has been reliably detected. In this presentation, I will show the examples of blindspots in the knowledge bases of vulnerability management products, try to describe the causes and what we (as customers and the community) can do about it.

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VMconf 22: Why Didn’t It Work As Planned and What’s Next?

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Hello everyone! In this episode, I want to talk about VMconf 22. It was an experiment from the beginning. Is it possible to host a Vulnerability Management event with little effort and budget? Looks like no. So I would like to talk about why the original idea failed and the future of VMconf.

The initial idea was to create a website, announce the launch of the CFP in social networks and everything else will happen automatically. People will apply and all that remains is to choose the best talks and manage the stream of the event. Well, no, not really.

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QSC21, VMDR Training and Exam

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Hello everyone! On the one hand, because of the pandemic, we have become more distant from each other. We work mostly remotely from home. Traveling to a conference in another country has become much more difficult than it used to be. Now it is not only expensive. It has become much more difficult to obtain visas, there are restrictions related to vaccines, tests, quarantines, etc. And sometimes the borders are simply closed and it is impossible to get there.

On the other hand, we have become paradoxically closer to each other. Conferences have become much more online-oriented. And the main event of Qualys, QSC 21 Las Vegas, is now available to everyone with no delays or restrictions. This year, I not only watched the show, but also took VMDR training, passed the exam and received a certificate. I want to talk about this in this episode.

Conference

I will only state the main idea. Of course the way I understood it. Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), btw not related to a security blogger Brian Krebs, started the conference by talking about attacks. There will only be more of them, and it will be more difficult to mitigate these attacks. Of course, if companies could be protected with prohibitive measures, that would be fine. But the problem is that in order for a company to be competitive, it must build the “permissive environment”. Especially in our COVID times.

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