Tag Archives: CTF

PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era

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PHDays 11: towards the Independence Era. 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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MIPT/PhysTech guest lecture: Vulnerabilities, Money and People

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MIPT/PhysTech guest lecture: Vulnerabilities, Money and People. On December 1, I gave a lecture at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (informally known as PhysTech). This is a very famous and prestigious university in Russia. In Soviet times, it trained personnel for Research Institutes and Experimental Design Bureaus, in particular for the Soviet nuclear program.

MIPT open lecture about vulnerabilities

Nowadays MIPT closely cooperates with Russian and foreign companies, trains business people, software developers and great scientists. For example, the researchers who discovered Graphene and won Nobel Prize for this in 2010 were once MIPT graduates.

This is a very interesting place with a rich history. So it was a great honor for me to speak there.

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PHDays8: Digital Bet and thousands tons of verbal ore

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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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Programmers are also people who also make mistakes

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Programmers are also people who also make mistakes. It’s the first part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” (or “Safe Wednesday” – kind of wordplay in Russian) recorded 29.03.2017. We were discussing why Software Vulnerabilities are everyone’s problem. Full video in Russian without subtitles is available here.

If we look at who commits, who adds vulnerabilities to the CVE database, they are very different people.

I added manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles to the video:

  • Why vulnerabilities are dangerous for business and for ordinary people?
  • How vulnerabilities appear in programs?
  • How to write code safely?
  • What motivates vulnerability researchers?
  • Vulnerabilities as a first step in writing malicious software

We wanted to talk today about software vulnerabilities. Tell me, what is it all about, why are they dangerous for business, for ordinary people and what are the difficulties with their remediation.

Speaking about vulnerabilities, it’s probably worth to tell how they generally appear in programs.

Let’s say we have a company. This company is developing some software. Some programmers work in it. Programmers are also people who also make mistakes. And if some mistakes that are directly related to the functionality of this application, can be detected quite simply in the testing process…

Are you talking about functional testing?

Yes, it is about functional testing.

QA specialists can quickly find these vulnerabilities, or these problems, these bugs. Some problems can not be detected in such a simple way. For example, some problems related to security.

Why? Because the main task of the programmers: the program should work.

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