Tag Archives: PHDays

PHDays VII: To Vulnerability Database and beyond

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PHDays VII: To Vulnerability Database and beyond. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, May 23-24, I attended PHDays VII conference in Moscow. I was talking there about vulnerability databases and the evolution process of vulnerability assessment tools, as far as I understand it.

To Vulnerability Database and beyond

But first of all, a few words about the conference itself. I can tell that since the last year the event got even better. I’ve seen lot of new faces. Some people I didn’t know, but they knew me by my blog and accounts in social networks. What a strange, strange time we live in! I was very pleased to see and to talk with you all, guys! 🙂

PHDays is one of the few events that truly brings all Russian community of security professionals together. I’ve seen people I have studied with in university, colleagues from the all places where I have been worked, and nearly all researchers and security practitioners that I follow. Big thanks for the organizers, Positive Technologies, for such an amazing opportunity!

It is also a truly international event. You can see speakers from all over the world. And all information is available both in Russian and English. Almost all slides are in English. Three parallel streams of reports, workshops and panel discussions were dubbed by professional simultaneous interpreters, like it is a United Nations sessions or something, recorded and broadcast live by the team of operators and directors. Final result looks really great.

Video of my presentation:

I was talking too fast and used some expressions that was hard to translate. The translator, however, did an awesome job. He is my hero! 🙂 If you didn’t understand something on video, I made a transcript bellow.

A version without translation for Russian-speakers is here.

Slides:

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Today I would like to discuss vulnerability databases and how vulnerability assessment systems has been evolving. Prior to discussing vulnerability databases I need to say that any vulnerability is just a software error, a bug, that allowing hacker to do some cool things. Software developers and vendors post information about such vulnerabilities on their websites. And there are tons and tones of vendors, and websites, and software products, and vulnerabilities.

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PHDays VI: The Standoff

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PHDays VI: The Standoff. A week ago I was at PHDays (Positive Hack Days) 2016 conference. For those who don’t know, there are two main events for security practitioners in Russia: PHDays in May and ZeroNights in November. Day-Night. Like this play on words. =)

phdays_logo

So, it was my 6th PHDays. I visited them all. But on this one for a first time I was as an ordinary visitor and not from organizers side. To be honest, I have never participated in organizing of PHDays, and just seen the final result. So, nothing changed much for me. As usual, organization was at very high level. And it’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of many participants.

Sad things first. And they are likely sad only for me. You know my passion to vulnerability assessment/management systems and scanners. So, despite the fact that Positive Technologies are the organizers of this event and Maxpatrol is still their’s flagman product, it was hard to hear anything related to vulnerability assessment/risk assessment/threat intelligence on PHDays. Isn’t it strange? Could you imagine this at Qualys QSC or Tenable event? Nothing much about critical controls and IT compliance in general.

It’s clear that vulnerability assessment is not already in trends in Russia. All are crazy about SIEM and slightly less about Anti-APT and SCADA security. Sad, but true.

Anyway, I have seen many interesting presentations about honeypots, computer forensics, machine learning and security startups. I also visited a SIEM roundtable with representatives of Positive Technologies, First Russian SIEM (RuSIEM), ArcSight, IBM Qradar, Splunk, and Cisco Systems. More details under the cut.

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