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. 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”. 🙂
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.
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 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).
The event began with an opening speech by Andrey Ivanov from Microsoft Russia.
I liked his thesis that “we are drowning in security data”:
So, it would be nice if somebody, for example OS vendor, will provide all this as a service, right? 😉
Then there was the keynote by Zbigniew Kukowski – one of the leading Microsoft information security experts.
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.
SOC Forum 2017: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Massive Malware Attacks. Today I spoke at SOC Forum 2017 in Moscow. It was a great large-scale event about Security Operation Centers. 2,700 people registered. Lots of people in suits 😉 . And lots of my good fellows.
The event was held in Radisson Royal Congress Park. There were three large halls for presentations and a huge space for exhibition/networking.
I would like to mention а stand of Positive Technologies. They have shown today their new PT Security Intelligence Portal with dashboards for executives and joint service with Solar Security for providing GosSOPKA functionality. Some stands were dedicated to Russian government Information Security initiatives: GosSOPKA, BDU FSTEC vulnerability database and FinCERT of the Central Bank of Russia.
During my presentation, I was talking how massive malware (ransomware) attacks can be useful for an organization. Quite a provocative topic, right? 😉 I meant it in the sense that all the hype around malware attack can help Information Security team to do the the following things:
ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s. Last Friday, 17th of November, I attended the ZeroNights 2017 conference in Moscow. And it was pretty awesome. Thanks to the organizers! Here I would like to share some of my impressions.
First of all, I want to say that two main Moscow events for information security practitioners, PHDays and ZeroNights, provide an excellent opportunity to meet all of the colleagues at once and to synchronize current views on important information security issues, including, of course, Vulnerability Management, the most relevant for me. My opinion is that this year’s behind-the-scene conversations were especially good. And this is the most valuable characteristic for the event.
Every ZeroNights event has it’s own style. This time it was some geeky cyber retro from 1980s, like in popular cult movie Kung Fury. The place was also changed from familiar Cosmos Hotel to ZIL Culture Centre. It is the largest Palace of Culture from the Soviet Moscow times. The combination of US 80s cultural artifacts, RETROWAVE music with Soviet-style interiors (including, for example, statue of Lenin) made a pretty weird combination, but I liked it =)
I was unintentionally taking photos using some strange mode in camera and recorded a very short video fragment (3-5 seconds) for each photo. I decided to combine this fragments in a small video. This does not make much sense, but, perhaps, someone will find this “time-lapse” interesting 😉
Among the great presentations and workshops, there were also a small exhibition. This year there was two Vulnerability Management vendors: Beyond Security and Qualys.
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