Last Thursday 14 and Friday 15 March the Conference Black Hat Europe was held in the great city of Amsterdam, a mandatory event for cyber security experts.
For second year running I presented on R&D outlining the security posture of Anti-Theft programs for computers and Smartphones.
As always the event had interesting lectures and other not that much, but I recommend the reader to check them all and decide what you like most. The topics were quite varied such as forensics, pentesting, vulnerabilities and secure development.
Regarding my talk, you can find the presentation on the website of VULNEX (here).
From here I would like to greet the people of MundoHacker and the other Spaniards at the conference!
In time of crisis there is much speak about entrepreneurship as the engine to lift the economy, or at least in the Spanish crisis. Now well, who assists entrepreneurs?
As readers know I am the founder of VULNEX, a technology startup that offers highly specialized offensive and defensive cyber security services. In recent months I have been talking with tech giants such as Dell and IBM Spain to acquire a few servers that will allow us to improve our platform for R&D and services to our customers.
Obviously the purchase amount is small for these giants but for us it is a significant amount so we are interested in getting financing for the purchase and to our surprise: none of these 2 giants finance startups, they tell us that they only finance companies with more than 2 years of life. INCREDIBLE and SHAMEFUL!
I guess these companies have forgotten their roots and above all how and where they began. In my opinion it is disappointing that they do not even evaluate the project to determine their potential and just say NO. How easy is to say NO to small companies!
Now I understand why Dell has recently presented bad results, with that sales policy it is not surprising. And what to say about IBM, the monster patent…
But hey, so is the world of entrepreneurs, a constant struggle that unfortunately you get used to. Of course in VULNEX we are evaluating other options in order to execute this operation and improve our services despite all.
Be ready for some excited announcements in Q1 of 2013 ;)
Dear readers, what is your opinion on the support given by large enterprises to startups?
You know you are in Texas when you get out of the plane and hear country music through the airport and I was there indeed because the 25 and 26th of October the OWASP AppSec USA conference was taking place in Austin, Texas, where I participated with a presentation on Web Honeypots.
The conference had more than 800 attendees, free and paid courses on different application security topics during the days 23 and 24, and of course an impressive selection of speakers.
My experience as a speaker was unbeatable since the organization, the same people who organized LASCON, put much effort and desire to ensure that everything went well. They even organized a barbecue Texas style for the speakers in a popular restaurant overlooking a lake.
And what to say about the Happy Hour for the entire conference where there was a mechanical bull, super music rapper Dual Core and authentic armadillos for racing, no doubt I was in Texas, yee haw!
With so many talks to choose from too often I did not know which to choose but luckily for us all the videos and slides will be released soon to be able to see them with all the calm and discipline that they deserve.
I had the pleasure of talking about Web honeypots, a topic I find very interesting and with much work to be done. Specifically I talked about a project that I’ve been working for some time and that I have rescued from the trunk of memories and that through VULNEX can devote professional resources :)
We can really see how American companies have a different attitude as being more agile as opposite Spanish companies, just see the photo of the Job Board with well-known companies looking for all kind of roles in application security.
From here I would like to thanks the entire organization for the super event and see you at the next appointment AppSec USA 2013 in New York.
Note: In a couple of weeks the videos should be online, I will keep you posted!
