Category Archives: Events

ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018

ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018. Last Thursday, September 20th, I spoke at ISACA Moscow “Vulnerability Management” Meetup held at Polytechnic University. The only event in Moscow devoted solely to Vulnerability Management. So I just had to take part in it. 🙂

ISACA VM 2018 Alexander Leonov

The target audience of the event – people who implement the vulnerability management process in organizations and the employees of Vulnerability Management vendors. I noticed groups of people from Altex-Soft (Altx-Soft), Positive Technologies and Vulners.

It was very interesting to see such concentration of Vulnerability and Compliance Management specialists in one place. Questions from the audience were relevant and often concerned the weaknesses of competitors. 😉 Here I will make a brief overview of the reports. You can also read here about previous year event at “ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2017“.

Talking about the audience, there were fewer people than last year, but still a lot:

ISACA VM 2018 auditorium small

The event was recorded. I will add video here as soon as it’s ready.

upd. Video in Russian. My presentation starts at 1:35:56

The event was conducted entirely in Russian, including all the slides. So, maybe I will make English subtitles and voiceover, at least for my part.

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CyberThursday: Asset Inventory, IT-transformation in Cisco, Pentest vs. RedTeam

CyberThursday: Asset Inventory, IT-transformation in Cisco, Pentest vs. RedTeam. Two weeks ago I was speaking at a very interesting information security event – CyberThursday. This is a meeting of a closed Information Security practitioners group. The group is about 70 people, mainly from the financial organizations, telecoms and security vendors.

CyberThursday 2018 Asset Inventory

These meetings have a rather unique atmosphere. Almost everyone knows each other. The event has no permanent place. It constantly moves between the offices of large Russian companies. The hoster, usually a CISO, can bring his IT and InfoSec colleagues. For others, only “bring a friend” format is available. This helps keep the event focussed and very informal. Participants propose and approve the topics by voting in the chat group. There is no place for marketing, all topics are practical and relevant.

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Qualys Security Conference Virtual 2018. New Agents, Patch Management and Free Services

Qualys Security Conference Virtual 2018. New Agents, Patch Management and Free Services. Today I attended a very interesting online event – Qualys Security Conference Virtual 2018. It consisted of 11 webinars, began at 18:00 and will end at 03:45 Moscow time. Not the most convenient timing for Russia, but it was worth it. 🙂

Qualys Security Conference 2018

Last time I was at offline QSC event in 2016, so for me it was especially interesting to learn about the new features of Qualys platform.

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PHDays8: Digital Bet and thousands tons of verbal ore

PHDays8: Digital Bet and thousands tons of verbal ore. It’s time to write about Positive Hack Days 8: Digital Bet conference, which was held May 15-16 at the Moscow World Trade Center. It was the main Russian Information Security event of the first half of 2018. More than 4 thousand people attended! More than 50 reports, master classes and round tables held in 7 parallel streams. And, of course, impressive CTF contest for security experts and hackers with an fully-functioning model of the city.

Hack Days 8: Digital Bet

I was very pleased that there was a separate section dedicated to Vulnerability Management. Something similar happened only at ISACA meetup last year. But here we had an event for several thousand people!

The session was held in Fast Track format: 20 minutes for the presentation and questions. I was the first to speak. My report was called “Vulnerability Databases: sifting thousands tons of verbal ore”. Here is the video:

And here’s a link to the version with only Russian sound track.

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CISO Forum and the problems of Vulnerability Databases

CISO Forum and the problems of Vulnerability Databases. Last Tuesday, April 24,  I was at “CISO FORUM 2020: glance to the future“. I presented there my report “Vulnerability Databases: sifting thousands tons of verbal ore”. In this post, I’ll briefly talk about this report and about the event itself.

CISO Forum 2020

My speech was the last in the program. At the same time, in a parallel stream, there was another interesting presentation by the most famous Russian information security blogger. Thus, there was a real danger of speaking in an empty room. 🙂 But everything went well. There were about 30 spectators and we had an active QA session afterwards.

As I wrote earlier, I started preparing my CyberCentral presentation several months before the event. I did not want to tell the same story again at CISO Forum and PHDays. So I prepared 2 different presentations. At CyberCentral, I was talking about Vulnerability Scanners. And at CISO Forum I was talking mainly about Vulnerable Databases. Of course, I reused some materials, but the accents were different.

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CyberCentral Summit 2018 in Prague

CyberCentral Summit 2018 in Prague. Almost whole last week I spent in Prague at CyberCentral conference. It was a pretty unique experience for me. I was for the first time at the International conference as a speaker. And not only I presented my report there, but lead the round table on Vulnerability Management and participated in a panel session.

CyberCentral2018 my presentation

From my point of view, everything was pretty good. I successfully closed my gestalt on public speaking in English. I definitely can do it. 🙂

The event was hold in Lucerna passage right in a center of Prague. Beautiful building in Art Nouveau style with famous ironic  “Statue of King Wenceslas Riding an Upside-Down Dead Horse”. 🙂

CyberCentral Lucerna passage

Even to speak in this building was a great honor. In my opinion the place was chosen ideally. It is beautiful and really good located. Lots of good hotels, restaurants and all main tourist attractions were in nearby. It was easy to go for a walk in a spare time.

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Microsoft security solutions against ransomware and APT

Microsoft security solutions against ransomware and APT. Last Tuesday I was invited to Microsoft business breakfast “Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks”. Here I would like to share some of my thoughts on this. Need to mention that the food was delicious and the restaurant of Russian Geographical Society is a very lovely place. 😉 Thanks, Microsoft!

Microsoft as a security vendor? O RLY?

Microsoft products are not actually my topic. To tell you the truth, personally I’d better live in a world without this massive Windows hegemony in desktop operating systems. I use Linux mostly. And even when I have to work in a Windows environment, it’s much easier for me to do all the work in some Linux virtual machine.

But in the real life almost every office network is build on Microsoft solutions. And if you are doing Vulnerability Management in any organization, you should deal with them too. The good news is that many security features are available out of the box in the MS products that you have already purchased. It’s just important to know about these features and use them right.

One more thing, why it’s interesting to learn more about Microsoft information security products. Microsoft developers, obviously, have direct access to Windows source code and know better how their own OS works. Many things are much easier for them to implement than for other security vendors. So, good chances that you will see in Microsoft products some interesting features, that other vendors don’t have (yet).

Drowning in data

The event began with an opening speech by Andrey Ivanov from Microsoft Russia.

Andrey Ivanov, "Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks"

I liked his thesis that “we are drowning in security data”:

  • Threat Intelligence from different sources that need to be implemented in your infrastructure and somehow validated. A good place to mention Vulners.com vulnerability feeds 😉
  • Threat Detection using logs, scanners, various protection tools, etc.
  • The overall number of SIEM inputs is growing faster than our resources. New IT system = new problems of SIEM configuration.

So, it would be nice if somebody, for example OS vendor, will provide all this as a service, right? 😉

Detect the undetectable

Then there was the keynote by Zbigniew Kukowski – one of the leading Microsoft information security experts.

Zbigniew Kukowski, "Effective protection against targeted and multilevel attacks"

Why is it necessary?

Here is what I would like to note from his report. First of all, great arguments why it is necessary. Ok, this is marketing. But the ability to explain (to sell) necessity of information security is important skill for any information security specialist now. It does not matter if you are working in a  security vendor, integrator or customer.

Zbigniew mentioned an interesting case: some Polish company, that lost $ 4.3 million in recent the Petya attack in 4 days. The cost of Information Security measures will be much less than the potential losses of business.

Another argument – attacks are not the entertainment for some individuals any more. Now it’s a well-organized criminal business. Dozens of people are working on popular malware tools, like Petya. That’s why ransomware tools are so popular now – cyber-criminals just want to return their development costs.

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