Kate Collins has over 28 years of leadership experience from front-line supervisor to CHRO, is a PCC executive coach, HR consultant, and leadership development expert. For the last 10 years, Kate has served as a leadership coach to Cyber, IT, Healthcare, Government, Academic, Insurance, Retail, and Finance professionals and has created custom leadership development programs for clients including a cyber-specific program Guidepoint Security. Other coaching client organizations include: Snowflake Inc., Guidepoint Security, DoD, Navy Federal Credit Union, Inova Health, Children’s National Hospital, StubHub, UFCW, and eOffices, Inc.
Additionally, Kate partners with a neuroscientist to support Healthcare and Cyber organizations in recovering from and preventing burnout. Kate travels nationally, and lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband (a Cyber-professional), daughter, and 4 (yes, 4) dogs.

This is the Way: A New Leadership Creed for Info-Sec professionals

With fun and powerful examples from Disney’s The Mandalorian, InfoSec professionals will explore the new and different leadership skills required after the immense changes in the past few years. Global events including the pandemic, inflation, supply chain problems, digital transformation, and political turmoil, have caused new pressures, new threats, and changes moving faster than an N1-starfighter in hyperspace!

Explore the latest research and trends in leadership, discuss the impacts on the InfoSec industry, and refresh your leadership creed. People leaders, technical experts and InfoSec professionals at all levels will be challenged to assess their current leadership strengths and discover new ways to stretch and develop skills to meet the intense demands in Cyber leadership today and beyond. This is the Way!

Come see Kate at RVAsec 12!

Kevin Massey:
I am a security analyst who does independent security research. I focus on vulnerabilities, binary exploitation, and network protocols.

Twitter: @Scratchadams118

Heap Exploitation from First Principles

In this talk I will discuss the process of building a userland heap allocator, identify the inherent vulnerabilities that exist in heap allocation, and demonstrate methods to exploit these vulnerabilities.

Come see Kevin at RVAsec 12!

Dan is the Chief Information Security Officer for VCU. He has over 20 years of experience working in IT and information security.

Twitter: @sensubeans

Beyond the pandemic: How the pandemic shaped organizations and their security architecture

How did the pandemic affect your organization and how it operates? Does you current security model still work with your organization? This talk explores how an organization transformed its security architecture throughout and after the pandemic.

Come see Dan at RVAsec 12!

Jason Wonn is a results-focused information security leader with 30+ years of combined national intelligence, information assurance, and cyber threat intelligence expertise throughout the civilian and military sectors. Jason is a “Richmonder” but works for Navy Federal Credit Union in Vienna, VA. He currently serves as a Cyber Action Officer, delivering table-top exercises and serving as a trusted incident response advisor to leadership during cyber crises. Prior to this position, Jason led the development of a cyber threat intelligence capability at both Navy Federal and The Walt Disney Company. He also served in various threat intelligence roles as a government contractor with MITRE, Lockheed Martin, and CGI Federal in support of the FBI and 1st IO Command, US Army. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Tarleton State University in Texas, and the CISSP and PMP industry certifications.

Twitter: @Wonnmeister

Corporate Dungeon Master: How to Lead Cyber Games at Work

Military organizations have long known the value of “training as you fight”, but commercial entities only realized its importance in the last few years. Consequently, the Cyber Action Officer role recently became a priority for the average company. Are you a security-geek like Jason Wonn who loves role-playing games (RPGs) and want the opportunity to lead a party through incident response to the most prevalent cyber threats? In this original talk, discover how to lead games (table-top exercises) at work as a “Corporate Dungeon Master” (Cyber Action Officer), narrating the story (facilitation), controlling the monsters (cyber threats), and creating an adventure that will have your players leveling-up (process improvement).

Come see Jason at RVAsec 12!

Colin Estep is currently a threat researcher at Netskope focused on developing user and entity behavior analytics for cloud environments. Colin was previously the CSO at Sift Security (acquired by Netskope), where he helped create a product to do breach detection for IaaS environments. He was a senior engineer on the security teams at Netflix and Apple before joining Sift.
Prior to Apple, he was an FBI Agent specializing in Cyber crime. As an Agent, he spent a fair amount of time coordinating with other countries to locate and arrest malware authors and botnet operators.

Twitter: @colinestep

Insiders packing their bags with your data

What if your organization could discover which of your employees are exfiltrating data prior to leaving? We analyzed the behavior of more than 3 million users, and will present the insights found for employees preparing to leave, the nature and quantity of the data they target, and the services they use.

Come see Colin at RVAsec 12!

Fletcher is currently a Senior Red Team Consultant at CrowdStrike, specializing in Adversary Simulation operations and Offensive Security research.

Twitter: @gymR4T

Context Matters: Tailoring Tradecraft to the Operational Environment

With the advancements in defensive capabilities, from endpoint protection to user behavior analytics, operating within mature environments has become more difficult than ever. However, with each of these capabilities comes constraints that Red Teamers can abuse to shift the operational asymmetries and increase their strategic advantage. This talk will discuss how Red Teamers can shift their current operational mental models to abuse these constraints to blend-in more naturally within environments as they seek to complete target objectives.

Come see Fletcher at RVAsec 12!

Mark Arnold has a 20+ cybersecurity career, serving 8 of those years in leadership roles. As a transformational leader, Mark has built security teams and programs, authored maturity model blueprints, and implemented security domain practices at large enterprises and service providers. Mark’s areas of interest include cloud security, threat intelligence, and vulnerability research, nation-state attack methods and related activities (e.g. information operations and disinformation campaigns), and their collective impact on nations and society. He holds industry certifications and degrees from Stanford, Princeton Seminary, and Harvard University. He is a former competitive gymnast and an ordained minister but, most importantly, a husband and dad.

Twitter: @lotusebhat

TOP 5 CISO FINDINGS OF 2022

Throughout 2022, the Lares® Advisory Services team has tracked emerging trends while assisting organizations of various sizes and maturity with Virtual CISO, IT/OT Risk Assessments, Offensive Assessments, and Security Program Management engagements. TOP 5 CISO Findings (most frequently observed not necessarily the most severe) resulted from our tracking. This presentation unveils the findings, discussing them in the context of current and emerging threats. I also incorporate an MIT Sloan cybersecurity use case and the Verizon DBIR to expound on the findings.

We close out the talk by listing remedies for the Top 5 Findings. A sampling of remedies includes the selection of a framework, threat modeling, and tactical assessments to help organizations discover and avoid the risks associated with the Top 5 Findings.

Come see Mark at RVAsec 12!

Rick Lull:
Lifelong geek turned security consultant after stops as a desktop tech, server bubba, and network jockey. Rick is a healthcare IT survivor, and is now playing Horatio on the bridge for hire with a local technology consulting company, advising clients on security strategy and operations. He currently holds CISSP, CCNP-Security, NSE7 and NSE4 certifications and previously held CEH and CNA certifications. He has promised to not make fun of any manufacturers during his talk.

Network 201: A Tour Through Network Security

Taking the Network 101 presentation in 2019 a bit further, this talk will dive into network security aka technical security controls that should be considered with respect to risk management in common environment, including private/public cloud and the recent industry buzz words around ZTNA – Zero Trust Network Access.
If you have ever wondered how you might use a VRF to segment authenticated user traffic, this is a talk for you. If you are trying to cut through buzzwords that a sales guy is throwing your way about how to protect your remote workers, this is a talk for you.

Come see Rick at RVAsec 12!

Dr. Andrea Matwyshyn is a full professor in the law school and engineering school at Penn State, the Associate Dean of Innovation at Penn State Law, and the founding faculty director of both the Penn State PILOT Lab (Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow), an interdisciplinary technology policy lab, and the Manglona Lab for Gender and Economic Equity, a technology equity lab and clinic.

She has also worked in both the private and public sector, most recently in 2023 as a Senior Special Advisor on Information Security and Data Privacy to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office of Enforcement and a Senior Special Advisor on Law, Technology, and the Digital Economy to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Her first hackercon talk was at BlackHat USA in 2003, and she has previously served as a specialty reviewer on the DEF CON CFP Review team.

Twitter: @amatwyshyn

Cybernation: The FUD, Facts, and Future of Software Liability and Security

When the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy called for “shifting liability to promote secure development practices,” the response from the security (and legal) community often overstated the novelty of the proposal. We have already been living with (various forms of) software liability for confidentiality, integrity, and availability failures for over two decades. This talk clarifies the legal landscape of both what already exists and the likely paths for the future. Cautioning against various security dystopias including Hannah Arendt’s “cybernation,” this talk offers suggestions on buildouts to existing threat modeling frameworks to explicitly consider factors used by courts and regulators to determine liability. These buildouts can better align the security team and in-house counsel in a joint defensive enterprise. But, two scaling issues will remain: the need for a technology regulator of last resort (a “TRoLR”) and a security community-driven model of professionalism.

Come see Andrea at RVAsec 12!