Category Archives: Video

Splunk Discovery Day Moscow 2018

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Today I attended the Splunk Discovery Day 2018 conference. It is something like a local equivalent of the famous Splunk .conf. More than 200 people have registered. The event was held in the luxury Baltschug Kempinski hotel in the very center of Moscow with a beautiful view of the Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Recently, I have been working more and more with Splunk: I develop connectors, write searches and dashboards, optimize them. Splunk has become the main data visualization tool for me.

Splunk Discovery Day Moscow 2018

Video from the event (27 minutes). This is NOT a complete recording of speeches, but rather some fragments and slides.

At the same time, I make most of data analysis with my own Python scripts. Currently this approach seems more effective. But as for providing final results in a beautiful way and making various notifications, in this sphere Splunk is really convenient and useful. Of course, I can make own a Web GUI application that will do something similar for my tasks, it doesn’t make sense if there is an Enterprise level tool that is very good for this.

My tasks are not quite typical for Splunk clients from Security Teams who look at it in the context of SIEM and SOC mainly. Asset Inventory is actually similar to Business Intelligence: almost all connectors are non-standard, and there are no strict requirements for real time (we operate with days and months, not seconds). We have same approach: “Bring some data to Splunk and get insights from it.” And in this sense, it is great that this event was NOT for the information security experts mainly.

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ISACA Moscow Vulnerability Management Meetup 2018

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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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PHDays8: Digital Bet and thousands tons of verbal ore

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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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SOC Forum 2017: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Massive Malware Attacks

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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.

SOC Forum 2017 Alexander Leonov

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:

  • Establish useful policies, like mandatory Windows host reboot after patch installation
  • Ban some convenient, but dangerous functionality, like smb file sharing between workstations
  • Implement useful processes, like system hardening (e.g. against mimikatz) or continuous processing of CERT (FinCERT) bulletins

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ZeroNights 2017: back to the cyber 80s

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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.

my photo ZeroNights 2017

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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