Topic:

Panel: Going Forward - Creating a diverse information security workforce

We currently face a shortage of qualified and security savvy staff in every aspect of information and related security fields.

In 2010 the USA Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that with very low unemployment among IT security pros, the scarcity of women, African Americans, and Latinos was and is still highly evident. How can we build a strong base of the best and the brightest people to face the ever expanding challenges within security if we don't encourage over half the population to participate ?

Our panel will discuss some of lesson learned , present issues and what steps we can take to improve our ability to build a even stronger and more diverse community of women and men working in security. Our highly-accomplished panelists will also offer insight into how they achieved their professional goals and how those interested in these initiatives can get involved.

RSA
Peter Andrious – Manager, Systems Engineering
Chad Loeven – Technical Specialist
Jack Estep – Field Operations Manager

Topic:

Implementing Lessons Learned From Being Breached

RSA will present Advanced Incident Response. The presentation will focus on the process, how that ties the many Security Technologies (Controls) together and how that allows us to drastically cut down on the investigative time, critical in an incident. RSA will review their organization pre-breach and post-breach to show how they applied their lessons learned. They will wrap up with a technical demo on host forensics inspection and memory analysis.

Bio:

Chris Astacio is a Manager for Security Research at Websense Security Labs, the team within Websense that ensures that our 65 million customers are protected against all type of web and email based threats. Chris is a specialist in javascript obfuscation and has done extensive research into web exploit kits, the most prevalent threat on the web used to compromise computers around the world.

Topic:

Evolution of the BlackHole Exploit Kit and Platform Agnostic Mobile Threats

Chris Astacio will cover two topics:

• The BlackHole exploit kit is hugely successful — arguably the most successful exploit kit in history. Chris will discuss how BlackHole has evolved since it was first identified, and explore why its developers have been so successful. He will also outline the innovations and enhancements that have contributed to the kit’s success over the years.
• Threats to mobile devices are less widespread than those targeting desktops and laptops. But as platform-agnostic exploits start to appear more frequently, will mobile threats increase? Chris will examine the possibility of mass mobile attacks, using tools like BlackHole, and discuss what vectors could be used to evolve these attacks.

Bio:

Until recently Anup Ghosh was also Research Professor and Chief Scientist in the Center for Secure Information Systems (CSIS) at George Mason University. He was previously Senior Scientist and Program Manager in the Advanced Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he managed an extensive portfolio in information assurance and information operations programs. He previously held a role as Vice President of Research at Cigital, Inc. In his career he has served as principal investigator on contracts from DARPA, NSA, and NIST’s Advanced Technology Program and has written more than 40 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles. He was awarded the NSA’s Frank Rowlett Trophy for Individual Contributions in 2005 and the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service for his contributions while at DARPA. Anup was named to the Naval Studies Board for a National Academies Study in 2008 on Information Assurance for Network-Centric Naval Forces and currently sits on a number of advisory boards informing the future of American cyber-defenses.

Topic:

Addressing User Targeted Attacks At The Endpoint - Killing Apts And 0Days With Behavioral Based Detection.

Your organization is under a state of constant and sustained attack, and every employee represents a potential point of weakness in your security strategy. Innovation in endpoint security is a critical need. New approaches to insulate the employee against these attacks are required. Today's most successful and common attack vector is to spear-phish your employees with email containing links to malicious sites and weaponized attachments. The adversary is getting onto your networks by tricking your employees into becoming accomplices to network breach every time they click on a link in a spear-phish or open its attachments.

The techniques used by your adversaries include:

• Spear-phishing emails that deliver the employee to malicious websites that run drive-by download exploits or include weaponized document attachments
• Hijacking legitimate trusted sites to push malware to unsuspecting users
• Poisoning search results behind trending news items on popular engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing
• Pushing malware through popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook

This presentation will focus on new approaches, without the need of signatures or lists, to fight against Zero Day Attacks.