As a Director with Cherry Bekaert Digital, Steve Holliday assists clients with improvement, helping organizations to use resources more effectively and efficiently, and to enable growth, by understanding the current state, identifying performance gaps and developing and executing improvement strategies.

Steve has 30 years of experience as an operations management, information technology, information security, and process improvement executive. His key skills include information technology, digital transformation, strategy and road mapping, systems thinking, operational analysis, risk management and leadership of change. Certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified Information Security Manager (“CISM”).

Why Should I Care? Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC): DoD / Non-DoD

Whether part of the DoD Supply Chain, or not, the Cyber Maturity Model Certification, largely built upon NIST 800-171, provides a great framework for understanding your information security risk and intelligently putting solid NIST controls around them. CMMC compliance is a time based mandate for Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers in the DoD Supply Chain. There are plans to push it out farther, and even into all DoD procurement contracts. Could it have broader application? Possibly extending across government and into Industry to create one common language for security? If none of these, then it still makes a dog gone good framework for a company to build out the management of cyber risk with an eye on continuous improvement. Come learn more about CMMC.

Come see Steve at RVAsec! Register now.

As an Azure Networking Engineer, Thor Draper Jr works on the rapid response team that assists clients with immediate remediation of Infrastructure as a Service issues. Thor is also a cyber security instructor with Trilogy Education Services and has taught at cohorts held at universities across the country. His key skills are in information technology, information security, management, and sales. His passions lie in networking and relationship building.

Raising the Average – Finding and Managing Mentors

According to Jim Rohn: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Meaning, the people you spend the most time with are the same ones that shape you into you. You are their average. This same relationship applies when you’re referring to mentors.

As the world continues to go more virtual, the nature of relationships has changed. While mentorship is essential to professional development, the times dictate you need to adjust your communication style to maintain these relationships.

Come see Thor at RVAsec! Register now.

Josh is the practice lead of Strategic Application Security Services at GuidePoint Security. He has 18 years of real world experience in developing applications and helping organizations across all sectors integrate security into their SDLC. Josh has worked extensively with financial services organizations helping to scale their large AppSec programs as the development organizations increasingly adopt Agile and DevOps. He is passionate about all things AppSec. In his free time, Josh enjoys hiking, playing guitar, and spending time with his wife and three children.

Introduction To Inner-Loop Security. Shifting Left, But Better

We can barely make it through an AppSec talk or article without hearing about the wonders of “shift left” and how it is the key to solving all of our security problems. Every intro to AppSec talk starts with the cost savings and return on investment associated with discovering security defects earlier in the SDLC and most of us have designed our AppSec program around these concepts. What would you say if I told you there was a better way and that we have been shifting left wrong? In this talk, we will introduce the concept of the inner and outer loop as the next evolution of shift left. Join us to explore a new model for shifting left using inner-loop concepts and learn how to better enable our developers to build products that are secure by design.

Come see Josh at RVAsec! Register now.

Jeff has been working in IT since 1998 and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University (BS-IS 2012, MS-CISS 2014) and the SANS Technology Institute (PGC Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing). Jeff also enjoys research and educating on Technical Information Security Topics including Network Security Monitoring and Advanced Persistent Threats. In addition to recently passing the CCSP exam, Jeff holds the CISSP, GCIH, GPEN, GWAPT, GXPN and VMware NSX: Micro-Segmentation certificates.

When he’s not delving into the cloud, Jeff enjoys Reading, Fishing, and Vacationing at the beach with his wife and kids.  He is also an avid Hockey Fan.

Infrastructure as Code: Theory and Concepts

Information Systems Engineering & Operations Personnel can realize Scalability and Consistency by leveraging Infrastructure as Code.  This presentation will dive into the Theory of Infrastructure as Code and the Concepts on effective use.  A pathway to CI/CD, and eventually DevOps, will be shown.

Come see Jeff at RVAsec! Register now.

Yonatan Striem-Amit, CTO and Co-Founder of Cybereason, is a machine learning, big data analytics and visualization technology expert, with over a decade of experience applying analytics to security in the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli Governmental Agencies. Prior to founding Cybereason, Mr. Striem-Amit headed the development for Watchdox, a leading DRM and SaaS security startup.

What’s Next In The Fight Against Ransomware

With ransomware attacks simultaneously becoming more effective and at the same time more prevalent – a ransomware defense strategy is top of mind for prepared security leaders.

In this session we’ll address:
– How to build an effective anti-ransomware security program
– Similarities and differences between ransomware attacks and other sophisticated operations
– The ranging impacts of a ransomware attack – both financial and other
– Implementations security teams can make today for better ransomware defense

Come see Yonatan at RVAsec! Register now.

An engineer at heart, Evan works at Cloudflare with all of the software engineering teams on the systems and products they are building. the first security engineer hired at Cloudflare, and also worked at LastPass as a software engineer, and was the first security hire at Segment.

Zero Trust: The Good Parts

After working on implementing zero trust at a multi-thousand person workforce, and working on building the product that provided it, there are a lot of learnings to share. Join me while I talk about the how we went about implementing zero trust at Cloudflare, and building a product now used by many other companies to do the same.

Come see Evan at RVAsec! Register now.

Tickets for RVAsec 2021 are now on sale!

We are back and looking forward to seeing everyone in November!

Tickets that were purchased for 2020 have been automatically rolled over into this year’s event.  You should be able to login to your Eventbrite account and access your tickets.  If you have any issues accessing them please contact us and we will do our best to assist.

There will be a lot of change this year as we move to The Omni and we are still navigating a post-COVID lockdown world.  Regardless, we are planning for a full event including two full days of talks, great speakers, meals, snacks, drinks, reception, after party, prizes, a capture the flag contest, t-shirt & swag!

We have already sold 50% of our available tickets.  Once we sell out there will be no more tickets available.  Please remember that you are not guaranteed shirts, bags and badges if you register late, they will be provided to attendees in the order of registration until supplies run out.  Further, if there are capacity limits priority will be provided in the order that tickets were purchased.

Conference ticket prices:

• $225 regular price until 8/31
• $300 late registration until 10/15
• $425 super late registration until 10/31

If you are unable to attend due to the price, please contact us to discuss as we do have stipends available for students and also have volunteer opportunities that provide a great way to get in for free!

Once again there will be no tickets sold at the door, and don’t forget that RVAsec has sold out every year–so don’t wait!  Please note we are unable to provide refunds due to processing fees.  You can, however, easily transfer your ticket to another person.

Register now!

First, we want to apologize for the lack of communication.  At the same time we want to assure everyone including our attendees, speakers and sponsors that we have been working hard to figure out how to bring RVAsec back even better than before the world imploded in early 2020.

COVID has lingered far longer than we expected.   While now is not the time to lower our guard, the downward trend in Virginia is very promising.  Further the distribution of the vaccine is progressing and Virginia now has launched a website allowing residents to pre-register.  With this positive news we are planning to move forward with an in-person event this year.

This year marks the 10th year of RVAsec.  We had previously made some major decisions prior to COVID to mark the occasion.  We are now finally able to announce our plans moving forward.

RVAsec is moving to the Omni for the next three years.  While we are extremely sad to be leaving our original home at VCU, this move gives us the entire hotel to take the conference to the next level.  

Again, the conference will be held in person November 4-5, 2021 at the Omni Richmond Hotel.

Previously purchased tickets for 2020 will be automatically transferred to the 2021 conference. More communication to follow on this.

We have been working closely with the hotel and will continue to be in touch with them to ensure the event is run in a safe manner, while still providing the best security conference experience.  For those that are unable to attend in person, we are hoping that we will be able to stream the conference.

Over the next couple weeks we will be in touch with sponsors soon to discuss details on the event, and we will begin to publish additional information and timelines.

We thank you for your flexibility and we look forward to seeing you all in person later this year!

-Chris and Jake