Ransomware made headlines in 2017, with attacks shutting down the UK's NHS and costing Maersk shipping over $300m in lost revenue. Ransomware is a massive business for cybercriminals, driving the cost of bitcoin from $1200 to over $7000 per coin. We often see ransomware as some unbeatable force, however with some common sense controls and simple tricks, the damage can be reduced or even stopped. Join Kieran to learn some simple, free steps you can do to stop ransomware in its tracks.
MongoDB World 2019: DIY Glucose Monitoring with Open Source, MongoDB, and GCPMongoDB
Monitoring daily glucose is a hobby for some and a necessary life skill for others. In this talk, I will give a quick tutorial on continuous glucose monitoring solutions for yourself using GCP free tier, Atlas free tier, and open source software. We'll also spend a bit of time talking about mobile solutions in this space, and alerting with Stitch.
From the Gaming Scalability event, June 2009 in London (http://gamingscalability.org).
This talk is an experience report from a recent online gaming project involving an extensive use of cloud and grid technologies. Gojko presents the benefits that his team got from a cloud deployment, such as low up-front costs and easy infrastructure provisioning and challenges and surprises including storage and monitoring issues. He then presents architectural impacts of using computing grids to power online casino games and talks about benefits, issues and challenges of gigaspace computing grids in a cloud deployment.
Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. He got involved with the online casino industry in 2002 and has since worked for leading UK online betting systems and some of the world's largest poker networks.
Preparing For The Flood. How Do You Conduct Load Testing To Ready Your WordPr...WordCamp Sydney
So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.
Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.
What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…
When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.
The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.
But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.
Key Take-Away
============
This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.
Presented by Robert Li at WordCamp Sydney 2019
Website Anti-Malware Scans - Set up a Malware Free Business Over the InternetCheapSSLsecurity
Learn what is Malware, how it breaks business into pieces and how GeoTrust Website Anti Malware Scanner help to set up malware free business over the internet.
MongoDB World 2019: DIY Glucose Monitoring with Open Source, MongoDB, and GCPMongoDB
Monitoring daily glucose is a hobby for some and a necessary life skill for others. In this talk, I will give a quick tutorial on continuous glucose monitoring solutions for yourself using GCP free tier, Atlas free tier, and open source software. We'll also spend a bit of time talking about mobile solutions in this space, and alerting with Stitch.
From the Gaming Scalability event, June 2009 in London (http://gamingscalability.org).
This talk is an experience report from a recent online gaming project involving an extensive use of cloud and grid technologies. Gojko presents the benefits that his team got from a cloud deployment, such as low up-front costs and easy infrastructure provisioning and challenges and surprises including storage and monitoring issues. He then presents architectural impacts of using computing grids to power online casino games and talks about benefits, issues and challenges of gigaspace computing grids in a cloud deployment.
Gojko Adzic is a software craftsman with a passion for new technologies, programming and writing. He got involved with the online casino industry in 2002 and has since worked for leading UK online betting systems and some of the world's largest poker networks.
Preparing For The Flood. How Do You Conduct Load Testing To Ready Your WordPr...WordCamp Sydney
So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.
Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.
What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…
When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.
The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.
But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.
Key Take-Away
============
This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.
Presented by Robert Li at WordCamp Sydney 2019
Website Anti-Malware Scans - Set up a Malware Free Business Over the InternetCheapSSLsecurity
Learn what is Malware, how it breaks business into pieces and how GeoTrust Website Anti Malware Scanner help to set up malware free business over the internet.
Conversion Rate Optimization 101: Make Your WordPress Site Convert!Chris Edwards
You worked hard to drive traffic to your website, so what now? It’s time to get down to the basics of conversion rate optimization on your website. Learn how to collect data, analyze data and optimize your WordPress website using various free marketing tools & plugins. You will discover ways to run simple AB tests, heat maps, basic and advanced analytics tools to generate new conversion opportunities within your current website.
Presented at WordCamp Tampa 2015
Measuring Web Performance (HighEdWeb FL Edition)Dave Olsen
Today, a web page can be delivered to desktop computers, televisions, or handheld devices like tablets or phones. While a technique like responsive design helps ensure that our web sites look good across that spectrum of devices we may forget that we need to make sure that our web sites also perform well across that same spectrum. More and more of our users are shifting their Internet usage to these more varied platforms and connection speeds with some moving entirely to mobile Internet.
In this session we’ll look at the tools that can help you understand, measure and improve the web performance of your web sites and applications. The talk will also discuss how new server-side techniques might help us optimize our front-end performance. Finally, since the best way to test is to have devices in your hand, we’ll discuss some tips for getting your hands on them cheaply.
This presentation builds upon Dave’s “Optimization for Mobile” chapter in Smashing Magazine’s “The Mobile Book.”
This talk was given at HighEdWeb Florida.
5 Essential Techniques for Building Fault-tolerant SystemsAtlassian
Building add-ons for Atlassian products today means building a Connect add-on and running it as a service in your own infrastructure, or a PaaS provider’s infrastructure, or (more commonly) a set of microservices. While this has many benefits, the transition from monolithic to distributed systems brings with it additional failure modes that simply do not manifest in the world of local function calls. Join Atlassian developer Diego Berrueta for a walk-through of 5 resilience techniques that will help keep your services rock-solid in the face of unreliable, slow, or faulty systems.
Diego Berrueta, Engineering Principal, Atlassian
Sending Emails Reliably & Quickly from Your Cloud Foundry App with SendGrid ...VMware Tanzu
Technical Track presented by Nick Quinlan, Developer Evangelist at SendGrid.
Sending email is hard. In fact, over 20% of non-spam email is never delivered. These are emails your customers and users want: password resets, purchase confirmations and more. Learn some of the pain points for delivering an email, how to overcome them and watch how to get your app running and sending email in minutes with SendGrid.
Step On In, The Water's Fine! - An Introduction To Security Testing Within A ...Tom Moore
My goal is to provide meaningful information in the area of virtualized testing environment options. I also wish to convey why an understanding of this subject is vastly needed and for the most part easily attainable, even though the subject is often avoided or overlooked.
Continuous deployment is a a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months.
Pascal-Louis Perez will describe how to use continuous deployment to iterate so fast that you run circles around the competition. He will cover the high level concepts as well as the nitty gritty details including examples from the continuous deployment system that he and his team developed at KaChing.
Pascal-Louis is the VP of Engineering and CTO at KaChing, where he practices continuous deployment continuously.
He previously worked at Google and holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
DevSecOps, or SecDevOps has the ambitious goal of integrating development, security and operations teams together, encouraging faster decision making and reducing issue resolution times. This session will cover the current state of DevOps, how DevSecOps can help, integration pathways between teams and how to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrating security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
Chaos Engineering – why we should all practice breaking things on purpose by ...Alex Cachia
What can we learn from fire fighters to make the systems we come to depend upon become more robust and resilient? In this talk, I will introduce what Chaos Engineering is and why it is important and share some real case studies of how people like Netflix and Amazon are applying these techniques to create more resilient systems for the benefit of their customers.
Containers are a developer's new best friend. For all the non-developers, what does this mean? This session will demystify this abstraction called containers, and dive deep on how it changes the way we provision, deliver, deploy and manage applications.
Speaker: Shiva Narayanaswamy, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
What's beyond Virtualization - The Future of Cloud PlatformsDerek Collison
My updated talk om the future of IT at QCon NY
What lies beyond virtualization? How do we start the journey to a secure, composeable, and trusted hybrid platform that truly delivers the business value and velocity we all want?
In the era of software-defined everything, one goal is to reach a fluid infrastructure that has the level of plasticity needed to self heal itself and provide higher level SLAs for applications and services. Adding value to existing applications and services in a transparent fashion requires a rethinking of core technologies in the platform space. In this talk we will take a look at some low level technologies and approaches to achieving this goal. Topics will range from Intelligent layer 7 SDN with semantic awareness, distributed scheduling algorithms, policy distribution and invalidation, health monitoring and management, self healing techniques, and the role of unsupervised deep machine learning and anomaly detection.
(WEB305) Migrating Your Website to AWS | AWS re:Invent 2014Amazon Web Services
Moving your website to AWS can provide you numerous advantages around the ability to grow, increasing physical security, and lowering the costs of running your website. In this session we'll focus on how you can move your existing website to AWS so you can take advantage of these benefits. You'll be hearing the about how BuzzFeed migrated to AWS when Hurricane Sandy impacted their operations. Director of Buzzfeed's Tech Ops, Eugene Ventimiglia, will walk through the timeline of the migration and describe how BuzzFeed was able to continue serving millions of users during hurricane Sandy. We'll discuss how to set up your site in AWS, strategies for managing the transition through deployment tools, load balancing trial deployments, and DNS cutover, as well as configuration settings necessary to ensure that your site will run well.
Conversion Rate Optimization 101: Make Your WordPress Site Convert!Chris Edwards
You worked hard to drive traffic to your website, so what now? It’s time to get down to the basics of conversion rate optimization on your website. Learn how to collect data, analyze data and optimize your WordPress website using various free marketing tools & plugins. You will discover ways to run simple AB tests, heat maps, basic and advanced analytics tools to generate new conversion opportunities within your current website.
Presented at WordCamp Tampa 2015
Measuring Web Performance (HighEdWeb FL Edition)Dave Olsen
Today, a web page can be delivered to desktop computers, televisions, or handheld devices like tablets or phones. While a technique like responsive design helps ensure that our web sites look good across that spectrum of devices we may forget that we need to make sure that our web sites also perform well across that same spectrum. More and more of our users are shifting their Internet usage to these more varied platforms and connection speeds with some moving entirely to mobile Internet.
In this session we’ll look at the tools that can help you understand, measure and improve the web performance of your web sites and applications. The talk will also discuss how new server-side techniques might help us optimize our front-end performance. Finally, since the best way to test is to have devices in your hand, we’ll discuss some tips for getting your hands on them cheaply.
This presentation builds upon Dave’s “Optimization for Mobile” chapter in Smashing Magazine’s “The Mobile Book.”
This talk was given at HighEdWeb Florida.
5 Essential Techniques for Building Fault-tolerant SystemsAtlassian
Building add-ons for Atlassian products today means building a Connect add-on and running it as a service in your own infrastructure, or a PaaS provider’s infrastructure, or (more commonly) a set of microservices. While this has many benefits, the transition from monolithic to distributed systems brings with it additional failure modes that simply do not manifest in the world of local function calls. Join Atlassian developer Diego Berrueta for a walk-through of 5 resilience techniques that will help keep your services rock-solid in the face of unreliable, slow, or faulty systems.
Diego Berrueta, Engineering Principal, Atlassian
Sending Emails Reliably & Quickly from Your Cloud Foundry App with SendGrid ...VMware Tanzu
Technical Track presented by Nick Quinlan, Developer Evangelist at SendGrid.
Sending email is hard. In fact, over 20% of non-spam email is never delivered. These are emails your customers and users want: password resets, purchase confirmations and more. Learn some of the pain points for delivering an email, how to overcome them and watch how to get your app running and sending email in minutes with SendGrid.
Step On In, The Water's Fine! - An Introduction To Security Testing Within A ...Tom Moore
My goal is to provide meaningful information in the area of virtualized testing environment options. I also wish to convey why an understanding of this subject is vastly needed and for the most part easily attainable, even though the subject is often avoided or overlooked.
Continuous deployment is a a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months.
Pascal-Louis Perez will describe how to use continuous deployment to iterate so fast that you run circles around the competition. He will cover the high level concepts as well as the nitty gritty details including examples from the continuous deployment system that he and his team developed at KaChing.
Pascal-Louis is the VP of Engineering and CTO at KaChing, where he practices continuous deployment continuously.
He previously worked at Google and holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
DevSecOps, or SecDevOps has the ambitious goal of integrating development, security and operations teams together, encouraging faster decision making and reducing issue resolution times. This session will cover the current state of DevOps, how DevSecOps can help, integration pathways between teams and how to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrating security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
Chaos Engineering – why we should all practice breaking things on purpose by ...Alex Cachia
What can we learn from fire fighters to make the systems we come to depend upon become more robust and resilient? In this talk, I will introduce what Chaos Engineering is and why it is important and share some real case studies of how people like Netflix and Amazon are applying these techniques to create more resilient systems for the benefit of their customers.
Containers are a developer's new best friend. For all the non-developers, what does this mean? This session will demystify this abstraction called containers, and dive deep on how it changes the way we provision, deliver, deploy and manage applications.
Speaker: Shiva Narayanaswamy, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
What's beyond Virtualization - The Future of Cloud PlatformsDerek Collison
My updated talk om the future of IT at QCon NY
What lies beyond virtualization? How do we start the journey to a secure, composeable, and trusted hybrid platform that truly delivers the business value and velocity we all want?
In the era of software-defined everything, one goal is to reach a fluid infrastructure that has the level of plasticity needed to self heal itself and provide higher level SLAs for applications and services. Adding value to existing applications and services in a transparent fashion requires a rethinking of core technologies in the platform space. In this talk we will take a look at some low level technologies and approaches to achieving this goal. Topics will range from Intelligent layer 7 SDN with semantic awareness, distributed scheduling algorithms, policy distribution and invalidation, health monitoring and management, self healing techniques, and the role of unsupervised deep machine learning and anomaly detection.
(WEB305) Migrating Your Website to AWS | AWS re:Invent 2014Amazon Web Services
Moving your website to AWS can provide you numerous advantages around the ability to grow, increasing physical security, and lowering the costs of running your website. In this session we'll focus on how you can move your existing website to AWS so you can take advantage of these benefits. You'll be hearing the about how BuzzFeed migrated to AWS when Hurricane Sandy impacted their operations. Director of Buzzfeed's Tech Ops, Eugene Ventimiglia, will walk through the timeline of the migration and describe how BuzzFeed was able to continue serving millions of users during hurricane Sandy. We'll discuss how to set up your site in AWS, strategies for managing the transition through deployment tools, load balancing trial deployments, and DNS cutover, as well as configuration settings necessary to ensure that your site will run well.
The Boring Security Talk - Azure Global Bootcamp Melbourne 2019kieranjacobsen
Troy Hunt and Scott Helme have spoken about all the exciting security things, so let’s talk about the boring bits! When we think about application and infrastructure security, we often think about the big shiny things and forget the boring bits. In this talk, we’ll look at the security of our package dependencies, CI/CD tools, how we send email and even resolve hostnames. Over the last few months, hackers have managed to inject cryptocurrency miners into all these places. Security incidents in these components might not result in an entry in Have I Been Pwned?, but they'll result in a bad day.
Troy Hunt and Scott Helme have spoken about all the exciting security things, so let’s talk about the boring bits! When we think about application and infrastructure security, we often think about the big shiny things and forget the boring bits. In this talk, we’ll look at the security of our package dependencies, CI/CD tools, how we send email and even resolve hostnames. Over the last few months, hackers have managed to inject cryptocurrency miners into all these places. Security incidents in these components might not result in an entry in Have I Been Pwned?, but they'll result in a bad day.
Troy Hunt and Scott Helme have spoken about all the exciting security things, so let’s talk about the boring bits! When we think about application and infrastructure security, we often think about the big shiny things and forget the boring bits. In this talk, we’ll look at the security of our package dependencies, CI/CD tools, how we send email and even resolve hostnames. Over the last few months, hackers have managed to inject cryptocurrency miners into all these places. Security incidents in these components might not result in an entry in Have I Been Pwned?, but they'll result in a bad day.
Troy Hunt and Scott Helme have spoken about all the exciting security things, so let’s talk about the boring bits! When we think about application and infrastructure security, we often think about the big shiny things and forget the boring bits. In this talk, we’ll look at the security of our package dependencies, CI/CD tools, how we send email and even resolve hostnames. Over the last few months, hackers have managed to inject cryptocurrency miners into all these places. Security incidents in these components might not result in an entry in Have I Been Pwned?, but they'll result in a bad day.
This was presented at DDD Melbourne, which is a shortened version of this presentation.
Microsoft has provided an almost unlimited number of ways for you to securely deploy Azure resources; but people continue to make simple mistakes. In 2017 many organisations had breaches due to poor cloud deployment practices.
In this session, you’ll learn how to use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy resources in a secure manner. This session will look at Azure Storage, App Services, SQL, Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. I'll discuss the costs, benefits and trade-offs of different design patterns and how you can secure your deployment pipelines.
The truth is that money can’t buy security just as it cannot buy happiness. Ransomware has become a cybercriminal’s most profitable enterprise, and something that IT professionals and even the general public now fear. Ransomware is actually pretty simple and unsophisticated code, and at times the damage can stopped with some simple tricks. Best of all, these are FREE!
DevSecOps, or SecDevOps has the ambitious goal of integrating development, security and operations teams together, encouraging faster decision making and reducing issue resolution times. This session will cover the current state of DevOps, how DevSecOps can help, integration pathways between teams and how to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrating security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
Infrastructure Saturday - Level Up to DevSecOpskieranjacobsen
DevSecOps, or SecDevOps has the ambitious goal of integrating development, security and operations teams together, encouraging faster decision making and reducing issue resolution times. This session will cover the current state of DevOps, how DevSecOps can help, integration pathways between teams and how to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrating security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
The IT industry has experienced rapid change and consolidation. The introduction of Cloud, Agile, DevOps and shortages in skilled staff have created immense pressure on enterprise IT teams. Organisations are concerned about the costs of data breaches, and need to act to ensure they do not become the next Yahoo, OPM or Target.
DevSecOps (or SecDevOps) integrates development, security and operations teams together to encourage faster decision making and reduce issue resolution times.
This session will cover the current state of DevOps, and how DevSecOps can help integrate pathways between teams to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrate security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
DevSecOps, or SecDevOps has the ambitious goal of integrating development, security and operations teams together, encouraging faster decision making and reducing issue resolution times. This session will cover the current state of DevOps, how DevSecOps can help, integration pathways between teams and how to reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt. We will look at how to move to security as code, and integrating security into our infrastructure and software deployment processes.
Evolving your automation with hybrid workerskieranjacobsen
Azure Automation wants you to automate everything, everywhere. Hybrid Workers allow Azure Automation to reach new places within your infrastructure, allowing for more automation and less complexity. This session covers the basics of Hybrid Workers before looking at balancing workloads, managing resource dependencies, integrating with web hooks and monitoring job execution. The is a great session for anyone who is automating infrastructure or cloud resources.
Global Azure Bootcamp 2016 - Azure Automation Invades Your Data Centrekieranjacobsen
Azure Automation wants you to automate everything, everywhere. Hybrid Workers allow Azure Automation to reach new places within your infrastructure, allowing for more automation and less complexity. Learn how to deploy Hybrid Workers, balance automation workloads across groups of workers, trigger jobs off via web hooks, monitor jobs, remove scheduled tasks and much more.
Azure Automation wants you to automate everything, everywhere. Hybrid Workers allow Azure Automation to reach new places within your infrastructure, allowing for more automation and less complexity. Learn how to deploy Hybrid Workers, balance automation workloads across groups of workers, trigger jobs off via web hooks, monitor jobs, remove scheduled tasks and much more.
Join me for the presentation where a blue-screen of death, is the desired result! MS15-034 was a particularly interesting vulnerability that turned out to have more bark than bite. Using PowerShell to test for MS15-034 presents us with a number of unique challenges, the solution is to look at a lower level, with TCP connections. This presentation will discuss MS15-034, what the vulnerability was, and how we can exploit it. Learn about working directly with TCP connections in PowerShell and the ins and outs you need to know.
PowerShell, the must have tool and the long overlooked security challenge. Learn how PowerShell’s deep integration with the Microsoft platform can be utilized as a powerful attack platform within the enterprise space. Watch as a malicious actor moves from a compromised end user PC to the domain controllers and learn how we can begin to defend these types of attacks.
Since its release in 2010, the Hak5 Rubber Ducky has been an overlooked component to an attackers arsenal. With almost every computer on the planet accepting input via keyboards and the USB standard known as HID or Human Interface Device, the Ducky abuses one of the ultimate trust relationships within a computer. The Ducky makes use of an extremely simple scripting language for the development of payloads which can then be executed at speeds beyond 1000 words per minute. This presentation will cover off the creation of your very first through to advanced payloads as well as looking at some of the tools you can use to develop your own.
PowerShell, the must have tool for administrators, and the long overlooked security challenge. See Kieran Jacobsen present how PowerShell, with its deep Microsoft platform integration can be utilised by an attack to become a powerful attack tool. Learn how an attacker can move from a compromised workstation to a domain controller using PowerShell and WinRM whilst learning how to defend against these attacks.
Learn about the advances in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012R2 that allow your users to work from anywhere in the world. Kieran Jacobsen will cover topics client seamless corporate connectivity with DirectAccess, managing BitLocker with MBAM, user document synchronization with Work Folders, addressing the needs of enterprise security and any performance requirements you might have.
CMDLets, scripts, functions, methods and modules all make PowerShell sound very complicated however with some simple guidelines you too can become a PowerShell automation Pro!
Infrastructure Saturday 2011 - Understanding PKI and Certificate Serviceskieranjacobsen
In every organization, there is a growing need for a strong well-designed public key infrastructure solution and in many of these; Active Directory Certificate Services will be used. This session will guide you through a solution based on best practice, shed some light on common issues encountered and some shortcuts to assist in management with PowerShell.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
So tonight I want to talk about ransomware, and some relatively free preventative measures you can do with your client systems to reduce the possible impact of an attack. When I spoke about ransomware back in early April at Experts Live, I really didn’t expect how things would change.
Just out of interest sake, who here has seen a ransomware attack within their organisation in the last 12 months?
Before we getting into the content.
My name is Kieran Jacobsen, I am the Head of Information Technology at Readify and a Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management.
I have a website, PoshSecurity.com, where I write about PowerShell, Azure and information security. I also maintain PlanetPowerShell.com, a community PowerShell content aggregator.
You can find me on Twitter via @Kjacobsen.
Ransomware upgraded to a potential killer this year. On Friday the 12th of May, the world experienced the WannaCry outbreak. Within a day, more that 230 thousand computers in 150 countries were impacted. Around 70 thousand were owned by the UK’s National Health Service. Systems including MRI scanners, blood storage fridges and theatre equipment were all impacted, resulting in Non-critical emergency cases were turned away and ambulances being diverted.
Speaking with medical professionals, the common belief is that this attack would have impacted patient care and potential caused a loss of life.
WannaCry was eventually stopped when Marcus Hutchins discovered a kill switch and purchased the required domain. We were extremely lucky that it contained a kill switch that was simple to activate.
WannaCry spread via exposed SMB services and a NSA discovered vulnerability in SMB 1. It has been attributed to the North Korean government based on intelligence gathering and initial infections originating in Asia.
It has been questioned if this really was ransomware. The bitcoin infrastructure behind it really wasn’t was well structured as other ransomware like Locky. I often wonder what the intent was for WannaCry.
Then in June Maersk was impacted heavily by the NotPetya. If you don’t know who Maersk are, they are a Copenhagen based freight organisation, who are often described as the worlds largest cargo container business. It is often quoted they handle 1 in 7 containers global and 1 fifth of global freight. This attack resulted in delays in the shipping and distribution of many products globally.
NotPetya wasn’t a typical ransomware, by all accounts it was a large scale attack, designed to inflict maximum damage to its primarily Ukrainian targets. It presented itself as ransomware, but its goal was data destruction. These are often called wiper attacks, they are designed to permanently destroy or prevent access to victim’s data. NotPetya has been attributed to the Russian government and some believe it was a cover for some other incident or operation.
NotPetya entered Maersk’s network via their Ukrainian offices. The initial vector was a product called M.E Doc, one of two Ukrainian tax platforms. Once on their network, it spread over the network to four other offices. NotPetya completely shutdown Maersk’s network for several days, leaving ships where ever they where. The overall clean-up took 2 weeks.
In the latest update to investors, their CEO stated the attack could have been much worse, however the total cost of dealing with the attack could be up to 300 million USD.
The truth of the matter is that the majority of ransomware still looks similar to this one. Emails being sent out in large numbers with malicious attachments or links to malicious files. Ransomware counts for 64% of all malware distributed via email, and the vast majority is from the Locky family. Internet security researches have witness some massive Locky distribution campaigns, Lukitus distributed Locky to 23 million email addresses in 24 hours in August, and then we saw another campaign distribute 27 million in September. There are a wide variety of ransomware strains belonging to the Locky family, and those behind it seem to be following an agile and dynamic approach to these campaigns, rapidly iterating and changing out emails and attack vectors. It almost seem like they are running a DevOps or agile methodology.
It is worth noting that some Locky campaigns seem just bent on destruction, however some are still in it to make money.
It is these attacks I want to focus on tonight, as they really are a silently majority.
So the strategy that I have been recommendation is one where we reduce the risks of Ransomware being successful. How do we do that? Well we can achieve this by making it harder, placing security controls, roadblocks as you might say, to slow down the ransomware and prevent it from achieving its goal of infecting a users machine.
I see this strategy much like the signs you see for theme park rides, you know the ones that say “you must be this tall to ride this ride”. Right now, the sign is really low, anyone can just walk up and pwn us. We want to raise the bar sufficiently high enough that those who want to attack us cannot, whilst ensuring that our users can still perform the tasks they need to. It’s a delicate balancing act, one that will take time, but the rewards are worth it.
Tonight I am going to talk about 7 effective ways of raising that bar. These don’t require you to by Windows 10 Enterprise, you can do these with Pro, you don’t need to buy any additional software either. All of the configuration can be done with Group Policy, scripts, System Center or even DSC.
There are two basic preventative measures that I am not going to talk about tonight. The first is network segmentation, and the second is patching. Both of these are not things you can overlook, in fact if you are not practicing either of these, you really should invest in these first.
Network segmentation is crucial to ensure that ransomware, particularly those like WannaCry and NotPetya cannot spread across your networks, from clients to servers and everything in between.
Patching has been critical for a number of years. I realise some people cannot patch, however every time someone says they cannot patch, my next question will always be, then how are you mitigating these risks?
Macros are a simple and effective way to encourage a user to run malicious code on their system. Ransomware authors have proven time and time again that they can convince users to enable them and run whatever code they want. I really struggle to find a legitimate use for macros. At this point, one has to wonder why Microsoft simply hasn’t taken the step to a firm off by default stance. The impact of Microsoft making this move would be to dramatically cut off a vital source of infections for ransomware authors.
The code on the screen is the macro from earlier. It is an obfuscated VBA that downloads a PowerShell based dropper before dropping Locky onto the victims system. Blocking macros, stops this dead in its tracks. No macros, no malware.
We can disable macros via Group Policy or Registry, and there are two different approaches we could take:
The preferred approach is to disable macros entirely
The alternative is to disable macros on files that have come from the internet. Whilst this seems like a more frictionless approach, ransomware authors have already started to instruct users on how to bypass these protections. I don’t recommend this approach.
As administrators in Active Directory environments, we know not to use accounts that are a member of Domain Admins to browse the internet. We are comfortable having multiple accounts for different administrative security contexts. Then why the hell do we insist on browsing the internet with local administrator privileges?
Linux users don’t run as root, nor do Apple users, well, enough said there the better, so why do Windows users, in particular Windows Power Users, insist on opening web pages as local administrator? Do you need local admin for cat pictures?
Some of the blame for these behaviours rests with Microsoft. The introduction of UAC would have been the perfect opportunity to make standard users the default. The argument has and seems to always be backwards compatibility. I am so sick and tired of this excuse.
Running as a standard user greatly reduces what ransomware, or any malware really, can do on your system. It is a significant roadblock for an attacker.
Now I am sure there are people sitting here thinking, he is mad, utterly mad, I need to be admin of my own workstation. Sure you can have administrative privileges, have a general use, non-administrative account that you can use to check your email, cat videos and the latest clickbait news, and then login to an admin account when you need to install an application. You have two accounts, admin and standard user.
On my laptop, I have two accounts, my everyday account is my MSA that I sign in, I have linked my work account to that as well. If I want to make a change to the system or install software, I have a local windows account with admin privileges. I run virtualization tools, docker, visual studio and vs code in this manner.
UAC has been an interesting security control since its introduction. I think the reason it is hated so much by users and IT professionals is simply because it was introduced with Windows Vista, and anything related to Vista is such an easy punching bag. Had it been introduced with Windows 7, I doubt people would hate it half as much.
UAC isn’t a security boundary, however it is a critical security control. The problem with UAC is it is a rather invisible mechanism that improves the security of Windows in ways that cannot be clearly seen by users and administrators. The fact it still exists in Windows 10 shows that it serves its purpose.
UAC changed from Vista to Windows 7, whilst it was a minor change to improve user experience, it has a negative impact on our systems overall security. The shipped default is now “notify me only when apps try to make changes to my computer”. With this setting, you will be notified every time an application attempts to make a change to your computer; however, and this is important, you will not receive a notification when you attempt to make a change. Microsoft made this change to reduce the notification fatigue that occurred in Windows Vista. In hindsight, our users were not ready for that many notifications, and our applications were so badly written that they produced far too many UAC elevation requests. It was also thought that users shouldn’t be notified for changes they clearly knew they were making.
The higher, “Always notify me” setting actually has some benefits. With this higher setting, most UAC bypasses fail, protecting our systems from more complex attacks. It is now becoming more commonly accepted that, in particular in enterprise environments that administrators should be configuring both clients and servers to this higher level. I run all of my devices at this higher level, and I really haven’t seen any impact.
Let’s see how old you all are. Does anyone remember the ILOVEYOU or LOVE BUG worm back in May 2000? Does anyone want to own up to being infected?
I remember this one, I remember how quickly it spread. The worm was extremely primitive, it was VB script after all. It was so effective simply because, double clicking on the script would execute it. The worm spread via email from machines in the Philippines, to Hong Kong, Europe and then the US. The damage estimate was put at around the 5 to 9 billion US dollar mark, with an estimated cost of 15 billion to remove. In 10 days, over 50 million infections were reported, or roughly 10% of internet connected computers. At the time it was considered one of the most destructive computer related disasters.
What If I told you that ransomware has just started to use this technical? Yes this technique is in use by some Locky ransomware campaigns. This year we saw some ransomware families distributing zip file attachments containing .js files. Much like VBS, double clicking on a JS file executes it.
Ever wondered why clicking on a .ps1 file opens notepad and not PowerShell? Microsoft didn’t associate an execution action with PowerShell scripts deliberately as they knew it closed off a infection vector. Microsoft actively made the decision to not have such an association, instead a user or application needs to explicitly run a PowerShell script. I really don’t understand why they haven’t given the other script files the same treatment, my only suspicion is our common friend, backwards compatibility.
Thankfully we can change the default actions for common script files via group policy or the registry.
Previously, Microsoft released the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, or EMET for free. EMET applies a bunch of security mitigation technologies that act as special protections and obstacles that an exploit author must defeat in order to exploit the vulnerabilities in the protected software. EMET isn’t a guarantee against the vulnerabilities cannot be exploited, in fact researchers have discovered ways to bypass the protections. The idea is to make exploitation as difficult as possible.
With Windows 10 Creators update, Microsoft decided to include some of these protections into the operating system, they have since further extended these protection technologies in the Fall Creators update. When Microsoft first introduced these changes in Creators Update, and announced that EMET was discontinued, some of us were rather disappointed. Microsoft has responded to that criticism and I am happy to say things have been greatly improved in Fall Creators.
With Fall Creators, you can now configure the exploit protection via the GUI, the group policy experience is a little bit better as well I am told. Fall Creators also comes with the Attack Surface Reduction rules, these are additional controls for office applications and macros, unfortunately this isn’t visible in the UI. Windows Defender SmartScreen has also been extended, Administrators can now make use of IP reputation filtering available in Windows Defender, these are also unavailable via the UI. Finally there is a concept of Controlled Folder Access.
I have deployed EMET previously to both production desktops and servers, and really haven’t seen any major issues.
Administrators like to argue with me on this idea, some find the idea of installing more browsers to be counter intuitive. The argument is that, by increasing the amount of applications that you need to manage you are increasing the complexity and management overheads, more effort needs to go into patching and as such security is decreased overall. I hate to pop peoples bubbles, but Chrome and Firefox are most likely already running in your environment, and they are completely unmanaged, how is that any better?
Your users are probably using Chrome, Firefox or even Safari on their home PC, phones or tablets, so why should their work PCs be any different? In some cases users can even install these without administrator access, so if they are going to install it anyway, why not do it for them?
Chrome comes with 32 and 64 bit, MSI based installers. I recommend using the enterprise 64 bit build, even on your home PC, as it is probably still the most secure browser on the market right now. Edge is catching up but it still has some distance to go. One reason to install Chrome via the 64bit MSI is then you can be sure you have the 64 bit build that comes with additional protections.
Even if you don’t deploy Chrome, check out their group policy templates. With the policy objects, you can modify Chrome in a variety of ways, including installing or blocking specific extentions. The policies will even manage Chrome that has been installed on a per user basis using the mainstream deployment tool.
Firefox provides some enterprise friendly long term support builds, and you can use a third party plugin to get group policy support too.
So on Sunday I decided to run a quick test. I decided to see what the Internet was like without an ad blocking extension.
On the left is news.com.au, without any ad blocker. Chrome needed to perform 720 requests, and almost 14 mb was downloaded. The page took 41 seconds to load. On the right is the same page with U Block Origin. 176 requests, 1 mb of data and it too 2 seconds to load.
Blocking advertising from our browser clients has many benefits, not only do we reduce the eye strain and the boxes covering text, but we also improve browsing performance and most importantly make our users more secure. Advertising networks are essentially a platform for JavaScript distribution, your browser goes to the networks servers for the ads, but is often redirected off to the content creators servers. It is here that things can go wrong, even with all of the checks and balances that the networks have put into place. In March of 2016 we saw the New York Times and BBC hit by ransomware malvertising; over the past years we have also seen sights like news.com.au and even Yahoo.
You can block adds on your edge using firewall, dns or web proxy rules, or you can block them on your client devices. The advantage with client side blocks is that you will also protect your roaming users.
Most people do not realise that there is ad blocking built into Internet Explorer with its “Tacking Protection” list functionality. It isn’t as powerful as some of the more full featured ad blocking extensions of the other browsers, but it makes a significant difference.
So that is everything for tonight. I want to thank you all for coming and listening to me tonight. Here are some links to various guides and more information. I will publish this on my website tonight, and the slides will be shared on the meetup page.
Thank you.
<pause>
Are there any questions?