New America's Cybersecurity Initiative at Black Hat and DefCon

Las Vegas, NV - This week, two members of New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative will address DefCon and Black Hat, two of the largest computer security conferences in the world.

On Wednesday, Kevin Bankston, Initiative Co-Director and Director of the Open Technology Institute, will join Trey Ford, Rebekah Brown, Brian Engle, and Mark Hammell at Black Hat to discuss threat and information sharing. Attendees and panelists will discuss what information should be shared and how it should be handled once shared, as well as privacy considerations and liability protections.

Robert M. Lee a Fellow with the Initiative, will be speaking at both Black Hat and DefCon with Eireann Leverett and Colin Cassidy. The talk is on newly identified vulnerabilities in industrial Ethernet switches popular in ICS and critical infrastructure networks. The talk is designed to raise awareness around these sensitive pieces of infrastructure. The group has worked responsibly with the vendors and ICS-CERT to coordinate their disclosure. Robert’s main contribution to the talk will be speaking on network security monitoring and how to identify when attackers are exploiting the switches instead of just waiting for a patch.

Katie Moussouris, also a Fellow with the Initiative, and the Chief Policy Officer at HackerOne, will be a part of two briefings at Black Hat and will be one of 10 contestants to prove her hacker history chops at the Drunk Hacker History event at DefCon. At Black Hat, Ms. Moussouris will discuss the potential impact the Wassenaar export control arrangement could have on the security research community, and will sit on a panel discussing diversity in the industry.