As an Information Security Program Owner, I get a barrage of e-mails and phone calls multiple times a day from vendors looking to sell us their latest hotness security product. Between the e-mails, phone calls, expo floor at BlackHat this year, and several talks that I’ve seen at past conferences, I have noticed a disturbing […]
A couple of years ago I decided, along with support from my management, that Enterprise Risk Management would become a focal point for my Information Security Program. I was convinced that framing vulnerabilities in the form of risks was essential to giving management visibility into issues they currently didn’t know existed and to give our […]
Next weekend, Jan 30 2009, there’s a Web Ops get-together here in Austin called OpsCamp! It’ll be a Web ops “unconference” with a cloud focus. Right up our alley! We hope to see you there.
This presentation was by Jason Macy and Mamoon Yunus of Crosscheck Networks – Forum Systems. It wins the award (the one I just made up) for being the most vendor-oriented presentation at the conference. Not that it wasn’t an interesting presentation, but their solution to defend against most of the attacks was “Use an XML […]
This presentation was by Dave WIchers, COO of Aspect Security and an OWASP Board Member. My notes are below: What’s Changed? It’s about Risks, not just vulnerabilities New title is: “The Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks” OWASP Top 10 Risk Rating Methodology Based on the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology, used to prioritize […]
This presentation was by Arshan Dabirsiaghi and was about the OWASP ESAPI Web Application Firewall (WAF) project. My notes are below: WAF Fallacies (at least in regards to OWASP ESAPI WAF) WAFs add attack surface WAFs can create culture problems WAFs can’t fix business logic vulnerabilities WAFs are way too expensive WAFs complicate networks Why […]
This presentation was by Michael Coates, the AppSensor Project Lead. Michael works as a Senior Application Security Engineer at Aspect Security. AppSensor is a real time defense system with the goal being to protect an application by detecting who is bad and getting rid of them before they do bad things. My notes from this […]
After giving my presentation on “Using Proxies to Secure Applications and More” at the TRISC 2009 conference, I decided to attend the presentation by Robert “RSnake” Hansen and Rob MacDougal entitled “Assessing Your Web App Manually Without Hacking It”. The gist of this presentation was that with a few simple tools (Web Developer Toolbar, NoScript, […]
I’ve been really surprised that for as long as I’ve been active with OWASP, I’ve never seen a proxy presentation. After all, they are hugely beneficial in doing web application penetration testing and they’re really not that difficult to use. Take TamperData for example. It’s just a firefox plugin, but it does header, cookie, get, […]
This presentation was by Alexander Meisel and is from a paper that was put together by the Germany OWASP chapter. He began by introducing the problem being online businesses having HTTP as their “weak spot”. Then talked about the definition of the term “Web Application Firewall”. It’s not a network firewall and not only hardware. […]
