Sunday 4 January 2015

Abertay Ethical Hacking Society run their fourth annual Security Conference: Securi-Tay IV

Securi-Tay [1] is an Information Security conferece held by the Abertay Ethical Hacking Society [2], and supported by the Abertay University in Dundee. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity to industry professionals, students and information security enthusiasts to attend and share knowledge and information. This year will be the fourth year the conference is taking place (hence the IV) and it will be held on February 27th, 2015. Personally, I believe this conference offers a fantastic opportunity to students to meet and network with experts in the area of security, share information and have a first glance on how their future in the security industry can be like. 

I was very pleased to get accepted to speak at the conference this year and I am already looking forward to it.

Thursday 1 January 2015

The Bug Bounty List - Bug Hunting

I started finding serious security issues and vulnerabilities back in 1998. Back then the community was so immature that I was getting so much grief every time I was trying to explain what I had found. The common response was "why did you check our system/application", "who told you to alter the input", "this was not suppose to happen, you broke it", "the others don't know to do this; why did you do it" and all sort of similar discussions. Unfortunately, back then they weren't any bug bounty or recognition programs for the poor security enthusiast like myself.

I am glad to see that the community starts becoming more mature and understands how valuable can be for a business the discovery of a security issue or a vulnerability by a "white hacker". I am also glad there are bug bounty programs out there which reward security researcher and security enthusiasts who discover security issues.