Category: Announcement

Speaker Feature: Andre Pitanga

Andre collaborated with and delivered projects for some of the world’s most technically advanced technology organizations, including many of the largest investment banks.

Focused on bringing the benefits of public cloud to highly regulated and secure environment, Andre has over ten years of practical experience automating security and compliance.

He is currently working with customers in ushering their most critical, and legacy, applications and environments to into a Cloud Native, service-driven paradigm.

Basslines and Baselines: The role of Anomaly Detection in Cloud Security

Cloud adoption continues to accelerate and to changes our industry, enabling new business models, new ways to accelerate innovation, but also bringing new challenges to security practitioners. Scale, complexity, limited visibility, communication silos, all impede our ability to maintain velocity while ensure our businesses and customers remain safe.

This session will present and explore Anomaly Detection, an approach that many believe will be essential in our efforts towards better, more automated Cloud Security.

You will leave this vendor-neutral, accessible session with a better understanding of the promise and challenges of Anomaly Detection, focusing on public cloud, multi-cloud environments, and carry back to your work valuable insights and information.

Come see Andre at RVAsec! Register now!


Speaker Feature: Kris Wall

Kris serves as the Chief Technology Officer and penetration testing lead for Critical Fault. After 10 years as a network administrator, Kris freelanced as a web developer for 2 years. Obsessing over the vulnerabilities within Kris’ own codebase, Kris began giving talks detailing the security issues and methods for stopping malicious attacks at the code level.

Since then, Kris has served as a penetration testing manager and as the co-founder for a penetration testing firm, regularly speaking at events on application security and digital forensics.

Digital Forensics: Reconstructing an Attack in Modern Web Apps

Application security struggles to keep up with modern development. Attacks against applications will only continue to grow. Web3? DevOps? Pipeline? Supply chain? With so many buzz words amidst a myriad of undiscovered vulnerabilities, where does your incident response team start after an incident?

Come see Kris at RVAsec! Register now!


Speaker Feature: Nicholas Popovich

Nick Popovich’s passion is learning and exploring technology ecosystems, and trying to find ways to utilize systems in unexpected ways. He works as a Red Team operator, trying to raise the overall security posture of organizations through adversarial simulation. Nick’s mission is the help individuals and organizations involved with defensive security operations to have an opportunity to observe the mechanics and methods of the attackers they’re defending against, and to assist in realistically testing those defenses. He’s a lifelong learner and loves finding new ways to get under the hood of systems and networks. He is a father of three and a husband to one.

Warning: This Message Originated from Outside of Your Organization

This talk is meant to highlight how end users have become desensitized to the ominous warning banners atop external emails, and can fall victim to phishing emails that abuse the trust in large, well-known organizations. The talk will run through examples of how threat actors can anonymously utilize built-in functionality to send phishing emails that originate from trusted, big-name, companies. These malicious emails genuinely originate from the large service provider’s email servers, and pass SPF, DMARC and DKIM security checks. The end-goal of this discussion that the risk is given more attention, and user awareness campaigns, technical email monitoring controls, and corporate communication strategies can take these risks into account.

Come see Nick at RVAsec! Register now!


Lock Picking Village and Contest at RVAsec

Now that we are all able to get physical again, it’s time to get back to picking some locks! A variety of example locks, from simple to extremely hard, along with a picks of all shapes and sizes will be available in our lock pick village.

Stop by and have some fun testing your skills!  Provided hand sanitizer will be required to help reduce the modern risks while we explore the oldest security mechanism on earth!

If you fancy yourself a strong picker or have a competitive streak, we are planning to have a time contest of a series of locks, with the fastest through them all taking home something epic.

We are thrilled to bring this back to RVAsec!

Register now!


Speaker Feature: Alex Nette

Alex started Hive Systems in 2018 with his passion for cybersecurity and the role it plays in today’s interconnected world. He brings executive-level expertise in the establishment and continuous improvement of preeminent cybersecurity programs and applies his work from various cybersecurity disciplines in a holistic approach that prioritizes organization’s operations. Alex has provided cybersecurity consulting for over a decade to the public sector for federal, state, and local agencies, and in the private sector for a wide variety of industry segments.

His work has reduced the cybersecurity risk for Fortune 500 tech, financial, healthcare, consumer goods, and energy companies; in addition to the US Department of Justice, Peace Corps, US Federal Aviation Administration, and US House of Representatives. Alex is also an active contributor to the development of the cybersecurity curriculum for grade school students in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Talk the Talk: Communicating Business Risk During Cyber Incidents

It’s one thing to investigate and remediate a cyber incident with your team. It’s an entirely different beast to manage your organization’s leadership at the same time. Communicating about how an attack can disrupt business as usual is a critical piece of managing the incident response lifecycle. In this talk we’ll look at:

– Methods for effectively communicating about the types of cyber attacks;
– Shine a light on how business priorities may compete with incident response (including legal implications, crisis communications, and reputational risk); and
-Outline strategies to help you receive additional resources following a cyber incident.

Including your organization’s leaders will help, not hinder, your response in the long run. Add these tricks to your tool belt to conquer your next incident response.

Come see Alex at RVAsec! Register now!


Speaker Feature: David Girvin

David GirvinHusband, Dad, Missionary, BJJ, Surfing, Hydrofoiling, Traveler, Hacker of all things. David is just a weirdo trying to fix interesting problems and raise up everyone around me through servant leadership.

Bootstrapping Your First AppSec Program

Application / product security is a massive challenge. From the technical to the social it can seem overwhelming. I want to help you get started in a seemingly overwhelming problem. It’s not, just like eating an elephant we will start one bite at a time. No budget….No problem.

Come see David at RVAsec! Register now!


Speaker Feature: Collin Berman

Collin BermanCollin Berman is a pentester at Capital One Financial, focusing on web, cloud, and cryptography. After getting his start playing CTFs in high school, Collin went on to found the University of Virginia’s Computer and Network Security Club. When not on the Internet, Collin enjoys hiking, camping, climbing, and skiing.

Slippery SOP: Edge Cases in the Same Origin Policy

Why is the web full of cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery even through browsers enforce the Same Origin Policy? Can we use the Same Origin Policy to mitigate these attacks? In this talk, we’ll answer these questions and more, including uncovering some shortcomings of the Same Origin Policy that can allow attackers to scrape sensitive information from internal websites without authorization.

Come see Collin at RVAsec! Register now!


Speaker Feature: Justin Varner

Justin VarnerJustin started his InfoSec career as a cryptographer at NASA, and 16 years later after exploring nearly every domain available, I’ve never been more excited to teach people how to use security to make their lives better.

Honeypot Boo Boo: Understanding Adversaries with Deception Technology

Breaches continue happening at unprecedented rates with huge financial impact to the global economy year after year and take a massive toll on the psychological well being of the security professionals tasked with constantly defending against threats from all angles.

Our traditional approach to breach detection that is focused on triaging alerts generated by massive amounts of aggregated data from disparate sources is not working. Adversaries know this fact and regularly benefit from it.

The average breach goes unnoticed for 287 days. That’s an exorbitant amount of time for anyone to surreptitiously run off with an organization’s crown jewels and inflict significant damage with ramifications that include consumer privacy violations, loss of trust, steep financial penalties, and irreversible reputational damage.

We need a new approach if we’re ever going to stop the madness.

This talk discusses this new approach to breach detection that is intended to improve alert fidelity, reduce time-to-detection, mitigate the blast radius of a breach, and prevent the massive level of burnout affecting the security community.

We will cover multiple methods for easily deploying effective breach detection technology right now regardless of the size and scope of your environment.

Come see Justin at RVAsec! Register now!


RVAsec 11 After Party — Illusions, Comedy, Mentalism — Register Now!

The RVAsec 11 after party, brought to you by GuidePoint Security and RVAsec, will be at in the main Omni Ballroom on Thursday, June 16th, right after the conference ends!

  • 5:00pm to 7:30pm: Food/Beverage
  • 5:30ish: Show Begins!

Chris Michael…Illusions, comedy, mentalism, music, and endless fun—all wrapped into one magical show. Chris’ unique blend of light-hearted but POWERFUL magic and humor have been dazzling audiences for 10+ years! Chris has been blessed to travel the world bringing fun and happiness to Fortune 500 companies, colleges and universities, and even major sporting events—he’s done shows for GE, US Army, Marriott International, Amazon, facebook, the FBI and multiple conferences and events.

This is an exclusive event, so you must be registered to attend or you will not be allowed entrance–no exceptions!

Important Notes:

  • You must use the same email you used to register to RVAsec.
  • Each attendee must have his/her own name listed (duplicates will be deleted).
  • If you are not registered for RVAsec,  your ticket will be deleted. 
  • Age Restriction: You must be 21 and over to drink alcohol. Non-alcoholic beverages will be available.

Even if you have a ticket for RVAsec and said that you wanted to attend during the signup process, you MUST now registered for the party!

Register For The After Party Now!

If you haven’t bought a ticket for the RVAsec conference yet, now is the time…. click this link, you know you want to!

Or if you know better, don’t click that link, copy and paste this (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/223787804347) in and purchase that ticket!


Capture The Flag (CTF) Run By MetaCTF and Sponsored By SafeBreach

The MetaCTF (https://metactf.com/) team is back for this year’s Capture the Flag competition!

We’ll be providing a practice environment on Day 1 of the conference to help participants prepare for the competition, find teams, and get familiar with the platform. If you’ve never participated in a CTF before, this is a perfect opportunity to get started! The actual competition will take place on Day 2. There will be plenty of challenges for participants at all skill levels, so whether you’re a seasoned CTF player or a beginner, there will be something for you! Among others, challenge categories will include web exploitation, reverse engineering, OSINT, cryptography, forensics, and binary exploitation.

You’ll need a laptop to participate. Teams can have up to 4 people, or you may compete as an individual.

For those who like to come prepared, we suggest that you have a VM or two ready. You can download Kali Linux here (https://www.kali.org/downloads/) or get a free Windows VM here (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/) or here (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/). Some tools that might be helpful include CyberChef (https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/), BurpSuite, Ghidra, Pwntools, and Wireshark.

The MetaCTF team has been involved with the RVAsec CTF since 2016. They also run private cybersecurity training for technical employees. If you’re interested in learning more about the CTF at RVAsec or what MetaCTF has to offer, please reach out to roman[at]metactf.com.

Thank you to our CTF sponsor SafeBreach!

SafeBreach