This is a guest post by the SAP security experts of BIZEC. Enjoy reading:
On March 20^(th), the first BIZEC workshop will be held at the amazing Troopers conference in Heidelberg, Germany. For those still unfamiliar with BIZEC: the business application security initiative is a non-profit organization focused on security threats affecting ERP systems and business-critical infrastructures.
The main goals of BIZEC are:
Raise awareness, demonstrating that ERP security must be analyzed holistically.
Analyze current and future threats affecting these systems.
Serve as a unique central point of knowledge and reference in this subject.
Provide experienced feedback to global organizations, helping them to increase the security of their business-critical information.
Organize events with the community to share and exchange information.
The “BIZEC workshop at Troopers 2012” will dive into the security of SAP platforms. Still to this day, a big part of the Auditing and Information Security industries believe that Segregation of Duties (SoD) controls are enough to protect these business-critical systems.
By attending this session, InfoSec professionals and SAP security managers will be able to stop “flying blind” with regards to the security of their SAP systems. They will learn why SoD controls are not enough, which current threats exist that could be exploited by evil hackers, and how to protect their business-critical information from cyber-attacks.
Once moreShmooCon is the place to be for some days in late January. Great con, great people and five ERNW guys amongst them 😉
We regard Shmoo(Con) as one of the most important community events at all and it allows us to meet fellow researchers from the US who we can’t easily sit down with to chat very often.
And some lucky guys from ERNW will even continue the trip to head to San Diego (!) for NANOG and NDSS. Not to mention they stay in some fancy beach resort ;-), while I myself fly back today. (Getting older I don’t enjoy staying away from home for a week anymore and I have been missing my kids since some days…)
It’s done. The exciting (and demanding) process of selecting talks for Troopers is complete (for the record: second round of talk selection was here, the first here).
We’re quite happy and looking forward to the event 😉
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Rodrigo Branco: Into the Darkness – Dissecting Targeted Attacks
The current threat landscape around cyber attacks is complex and hard to understand even for IT pros. The media coverage on recent events increases the challenge by putting fundamentally different attacks into the same category, often labeled as advanced persistent threats (APTs). The resulting mix of attacks includes everything from broadly used, exploit-kit driven campaigns driven by cyber criminals, to targeted attacks that use 0-day vulnerabilities and are hard to fend off – blurring the threat landscape, causing confusion where clarity is most needed.
after having announced the first round of Troopers speakers here, we’re happy to publish the second round today 😉
Here we go:
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Dmitry Sklyarov – “Secure Password Managers” and “Military-Grade Encryption” on Smartphones: Oh Really?
Abstract: The task of providing privacy and data confidentiality with mobile applications becomes more and more important as the adoption of smartphones and tablets grows. As a result, there are a number of vendors and applications providing solutions to address those needs, such as password managers and file encryption utilities for mobile devices.
We’re delighted to provide the first announcement of talks of next year’s Troopers edition. Looks like it’s going to be a great event again 😉
Here we go:
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Andreas Wiegenstein: Real SAP Backdoors
Abstract: In the past year the number of lecture sessions with traumatizing headlines about hacking SAP systems has dramatically risen. Their content, however, is usually the same. Insecure implementations of algorithms, side effects in commands, flawed business logic and designs that brilliantly miss the point of security. In essence, security defects built into the SAP framework by mistake.
This week I stayed some days in Zurich, to give a workshop and to meet both clients and fellow researchers (kudos again to C. for the awesome office tour @Google). In the course of one of those dinners somehow Troopers was mentioned and a guy asked: “I’ve heard of the conference. What’s so special about it?”
Funnily enough I didn’t even have to respond myself as a 2011 attendee coincidentally present at the table jumped in and started praising the event (“best con ever. great spirit, great talks”). Obviously this gave me a big grin… but it reminded as well me that some of you might ask themselves the very same question.
Here we go again: TROOPERS12 is scheduled for March 19^(th) – 23^(rd) 2012 in Heidelberg, Germany.
Those who attended TROOPERS before know for what we are up to. For all newcomers I’ll quickly outline what’s going to happen:
TROOPERS is your premium IT security event in Europe. Think of your usual IT educational event without annoying sales pitching and outdated topics. Now add a superb conference location, an elite line-up of international researchers and practitioners as well as an organizing team not dedicated to make a living doing this, but to celebrate our craftsmanship together with like-minded people.
During the last days, some of our guys (including me) had some great days in Dayton. Rene, Christopher, Hendrik, Sergej, and me flew in to give workshops and presentations at Day-Con as well as to compete in the infamous PacketWars game. While Day-Con is a one day event, the two days before the conference comprised workshops on secure iOS integration (given by Rene) and IPv6 security (given by Christopher). Since the overall topic of the conference was trust, Rene gave a keynote on broken trust which was based exemplary trust analysis, development of a trust metric, and different trust factors. Those trust factors were also used in my talk about evaluation methodologies for cloud service providers (regular followers will recognize some of the content of both talks from differentposts 😉 ). There were also talks from Sergey Bratus, Graeme Neilson and Angus Blitter. While Sergey proposed a sound (not to say academic 😉 ) definition on the classification of vulnerabilities and their connection to turing complete input languages, Angus gave an introduction to PowerLine technologies and laid out, that these technologies still suffer from naive assumptions about trusted networks (he also refered to this). The day after the conference, the ERNW Allstars had to defend their championship title in PacketWars. Since the first battle was scheduled for 10AM, we had quite some time to tan in the sunny 30°C weather, recover from the conference and prepare the expected victory celebration (some of you might remember some “Champagne tradition” from Troopers). In face of this motivation, we rushed through the 3 battles and were able to score first place second year in a row. At this point, kudos to the two other participating teams who gave us a tough battle, especially during the reversing challenges.
Hi,
didn’t find the time so far to post a short blog about HITB Amsterdam so far… but here we go.
Unfortunately I couldn’t arrive in AMS earlier than Thursday evening so I missed the first day (and – from what I heard – some great talks). However we went out for dinner that night with the likes of Andreas (Wiegenstein), Jim (Geovedi), Raoul (Chiesa), Travis (Goodspeed), Claudio (Criscione) and some more guys and I had some quite good conversations, both on technical matters and on Intra-European cultural differences ;-). Btw: thanks again to Martijn for taking care of the restaurant.
TROOPERS11 was a blast! We received great feedback from all attendees and speakers. This really pushes ourselves towards the next goals and an even better security conference in 2012.
We’re happy that everybody got home safely with new ideas and inspirations in mind. On a side note: The awesome TROOPERS badge caused trouble for some of you with the airport security 😉 I really hope everybody could find a way to take it back home. It will hopefully find its way to an adequate place right next to your old memorabilia (cup of the first won soccer match, your college degree or photos from your first ballet show). Regard it as the proof of your latest achievement and tell everybody proud and loud: WE ARE TROOPERS.