CSCAMP2013 | 4 years of Success
Contribute to the change
The first information security conference of its type in the middle east & north africa which gathers top information security experts from the arab world and worldwide for sharing novel information security trends, strategies & views was held in the period of 22th till 23rd of november under the theme of “contribute to the change”.
As usual the conference was preceded by a specialized training in infosec topics and a challenge for capture the flag (ctf). This year a specialized web application penetration testing training (assessing and exploiting web applications with samurai-wtf) was offered by justin searle. Justin searle is a managing partner of utilisec, he is the creator of the samurai distribution; the most popular linux distribution used by web pentesters.
The feedback came from the attendee of the “assessing and exploiting web applications with samurai-wtf” training was so positive where most of the training was focused on practice and hands-on where one of the attendees (basem helmy) comment on the training “the most important thing i have benefit from the wtf training is the web pentesting methodology that was introduced and the logical way of thinking during testing”.
Also the ctf challenge was unique in its preparation and participants this year where arabcert and bluekaizen team who organized the challenge included egyptians and tunisians ctf writers. The qualification phase consisted of 30 levels and had more than 250 teams from all over the world. This year ctf consisted of many challenges in reversing, steganography, web hacking, cryptography and forensics. The ctf started in 13th of november by pre-qualification challenges for 3 days then the best teams were invited to the 2 day of the conference for the final challenges where more smoked leet chicken (mslc) (1st place, russia), r0x (2nd place, egypt), rabaa(3rd place, egypt) were the top 3 teams to win the ctf.
This year the conference included different discussion sessions covering different aspects of information security domain including compliance, innovated techniques in threat analysis and forensics, advanced topic in security and case studies.
A set of the remarkable sessions in advanced topics and case studies were presented one of them was presented by brigadier general abdelrahman radwan who presented the some of the cybercrime cases solved by internet investigation unit in egyptian ministry for internal affairs. Also a unique session was presented by justin searle covering smart grid security architecture and the challenges appeared with grid architectures such as electricity grid
Another advanced topic was mobile security which was covered by two sessions. One was presented by ahmed saafan who presented a deep comparison between security indifferent mobile platform, and another one was presented by anwar mohamed who introduced pwncore as a platform for pentesting android.
Other set of sessions included important debate topics covering anonymity, privacy and trust. The first session was introduced by prof. Sherif el-kassas who introduced the question on trusting open design and possible research directions to establish evaluation metrics and methodology suitable for open source development. Another two session covered anonymity & privacy on the internet were introduced by ahmed elashmawy & ayman elzoghby.
The most dominant set of sessions during the conference was innovated techniques in threat analysis and forensics which included of 6 sessions. One of the interesting topic covered “dns analytics” a new tool developed by qcert team for malware detection using dns logs which was presented by osama kamal. Also another interesting one was intelligent threat analysis which was covered by two sessions one presented by “mohamed alfateh” who introduce a web offensive shield which perform an advanced counter attack against any malicious user, the other session was presented by “ahmed atef selim” who intro- duced new terminology “security intelligence center”
which replaces ordinary “security operation center” by introducing a ohoneynet project as revival for the honeynet project tools to help in predicting attacks on the organization and converting defensive techniques to proactive instead of reactive. Also a remarkable session was introduced by ahmed f.Shosha who introduced his work in forensics by introducing open source forensic hardware as alternative to commercial.
A new set of sessions was newly introduced during this year conference which covered compliance and asset management. The most remarkable session was introduced by ahmed riad and waleed yasser who introduced their vision in integrating iso/iec 27001:2013 & iso 22301:2012 in practice.
As final conclusion the conference this year was unique in its variety of topics covered specially the compliance sessions, also the innovated techniques in threat analysis and forensics were very interesting in introducing hands-on and efforts done in threat analysis and forensics, and as every year conference advanced topics and debate sessions that were introduced opens new aspects for infosec specialists in egypt & arab world.
