They're Hacking Our Clients! Introducing Free Client-side Intrusion Prevention

Presented at DEF CON 16 (2008), Aug. 10, 2008, noon (50 minutes)

In the face of far stronger firewall and IPS-protected perimeters,attackers are compromising far more systems by hacking our web browsers, e-mail clients, and office document tools. Unfortunately,vulnerability assessment practices still focus on checking listening services, even on workstations. Detecting vulnerable clients is left for patch management tools, which aren't in consistent or wide enough use. Even when organizations are able to invest the time and money in a patch management system, a series of critical problems keeps the botnet builders in business.This talk, by Bastille UNIX creator Jay Beale, introduces a free tool to detect vulnerable clients and keep them out of the botnets.


Presenters:

  • Jay Beale - Senior Security Consultant and Co-Founder, Intelguardians Network Intelligence, Inc.
    Jay Beale is an information security specialist, well known for his work on threat avoidance and mitigation technology. He's written two of the most popular security hardening tools: Bastille UNIX, a system lockdown and audit tool that introduced a vital security-training component, and the Center for Internet Security's Unix Scoring Tool. Both are used worldwide throughout private industry and government. Through Bastille and his work with the Center, Jay has provided leadership in the Linux system hardening space, participating in efforts to set, audit, and implement standards for Linux/Unix security within industry and government. Jay also contributed to the OVAL project and the Honeynet Project. Jay has served as an invited speaker at a variety of conferences worldwide as well as government symposia. He's written for Information Security Magazine, SecurityFocus, and SecurityPortal. Jay has co-authored or edited nine books in the Information Security space. Six of these make up his Open Source Security Series, while two are technical works of fiction in the "Stealing the Network" series. Jay is a security analyst and managing partner at Intelguardians, where he gets to work with brilliant people on topics ranging from application penetration to virtual machine escape. Prior to this, Jay served as the Security Team Director for MandrakeSoft, helping set company strategy, design security products, and pushing security into the then third largest retail Linux distribution.

Links: