Anthony Martini ’16 attends BlackHat conference in Vegas

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Seidenberg’s own Anthony Martini (MS-CS ‘16), recipient of the NSF CyberCorps scholarship for service, recently attended the prestigious Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is the fourth information security conference that Anthony has attended in the last two and a half years, thanks to the support of CyberCorps and other scholarships.

Read on for Anthony’s experiences!

What is Black Hat? 

“Black Hat is one of the most well known information security conferences in the world. Black Hat, held in Las Vegas, is part of “InfoSec Week,” along with Def-Con and B-Sides. At Black Hat, I learned about some of the latest and greatest hacks and breakthroughs in the field of InfoSec. I heard from some of the greatest and most experienced in security and the InfoSec industry at large, like Richard Bejtlich, the author of  The Practice of Network Security.

“For all those who attended using the Student Scholarship, a breakfast was held the first day to introduce the newcomers to the spirit of BlackHat (and get them fed!). A few presenters gave informal background stories on their lives in InfoSec and what the industry is looks like in their eyes; this was some of the most important insight I gained. They advised us as newcomers to plan to attend 3-4 talks.  The rest of the time, they said, go create a community and learn how to make it better. I took that message to heart.”

Some Highlights from Black Hat

Innovation City

Innovation City showcased a number of startup security efforts. Some touched upon new ways of Information Sharing, which is an effort to decrease the effectiveness of newly discovered bugs by spreading knowledge of their existence to partners in the program. In general, the ideas presented were turnkey solutions, which needed some time to develop before they could become scalable solutions for an enterprise.

Arsenal

One of the most valuable assets to a security minded person is their ability to understand hands-on labs and attacks. The Arsenal included sessions on multiple attacks and creative new venues that teach exploit-ready software and plugins for popular tools. Almost all of these tools have free versions, or can be found open source.

PWNIE Awards (Pronounced:[Pone-e])

The Hacker community has a fascination with sophistication when it comes to exploitation. So in order to officially recognize this at the conference and give credit where credit is due to those who best  ‘PWN’ in categories such as Priv-Escalation, Server-Side/Client-Side Bugs, most innovative research , and lastly infamy for the worst (or best mishandling) vendor response to an incident.

The Facility

anthony2Mandalay Bay Conference Center is an outstanding facility. The scale of this is easily the size of Madison square garden. It was definitely possible to get lost, but once you find the quadrant that contains the core BlackHat Venue, it was easy enough to get around. Many of the social activities that accompany the Con, however, were spread out in the facility and could be hard to find.

Mandalay Bay Conference Center has a rooftop venue called the ‘Foundation Room’, which overlooked the entire strip that contains the most concentrated area of the city.

How I Attended the Conference

Black Hat offers scholarships for students to attend the conference.

Requirements: In order to apply for one of these scholarships, students must meet the following criteria:

  • Must be at least 18 years old at the time of the event
  • Must provide copy of verifiable proof of full-time academic status at an accredited college or university.
  • Must provide copy of valid and current college/university ID card

Anthony’s advice for those thinking about applying? “Apply, do it!” 

Seidenberg organizes important HPCC conference for this month

IEEEPace University Seidenberg Computer Science (CS) Department at Westchester is organizing the 17th IEEE HPCC 2015 (IEEE High Performance Computing and Communications) conference that will be held on Aug. 24- 26, 2015 at the Hilton Newark Airport Hotel, NJ. Faculty member Dr. Meikang Qiu from the CS Department at Westchester is its General Chair, and Pace University’s CS-PhD students and faculty will present a dozen of quality papers at IEEE HPCC 2015 or its co-located conferences.

The IEEE HPCC conference is a prominent conference in the world of computing. The conference focuses on providing a platform for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to address the profound challenges in global High Performance Computing (HPC), and present their new experiences and research done in all aspects of HPC, Big Data, cloud computing, and related topics. There will also be eight co-located conferences, symposiums, summits, and workshops, also run as part of IEEE. The co-located events will include the 12th ICESS (International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems), the 7th CSS  (International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security), BigDataSecurity 2015 (International Symposium on Big Data Security on Cloud), HPSC 2015 (International High Performance and Smart Computing), SmartData 2015 (International Symposium on Smart Data), and the High Performance Big Data Summit (HBD).

IEEE HPCC 2015 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on high performance computing and communications from both academia and industry in the world. The conference usually brings in around 400 Computer Science professors and scholars from across the world. Among the dozen of IEEE/ACM fellows delivering the keynotes are Jack Dongarra (top scholar in High Performance Computing, ACM and IEEE Fellow), Sun-Yuan Kung (IEEE Fellow, Princeton University), Xiaodong Wang (IEEE Fellow, Columbia University), Tarek EI-Ghazawi (IEEE Fellow, GWU), Sandeep Shukla (IEEE Fellow, IIT India), and Ruqian Lu (Academician of Chinese Academy of Science). More than ten industrial entrepreneur leaders will deliver important topics about High-performance Big Data (HBD) on the associated summit, including Jim Jeffers (Intel), Long Fei (Google), Stan Posey (NVIDIA), Kevin Johnson (IBM), Greg Clifford (Cray), and Yung-Chin Fang (Dell).

The conference is organized by IEEE HPCC/ICESS/CSS 2015 committees and sponsored by IEEE, IEEE TCSC, IEEE Computer Society, Pace University, and Longxiang High Tech Group. This conference will be a great opportunity for scholars to connect with academics within a harmonious atmosphere filled with enthusiastic, experienced, and successful members of the computing society. The high-quality research papers presented in the conference cover a broad scope of academic research topics in computer science. The research achievements showcased at these conferences include experimental efforts, innovative system designs, novel technology explorations and evaluations, and investigations identifying the weakness in the existing computing and communication technologies.

PhotoJournal: HBO-Sponsored Write/Speak/Code Conference

 

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Seidenberg recently hosted a conference for women in tech with our friends over at Write/Speak/Code. We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite shots from conference! Take a look at what Write/Speak/Code is doing to help make our women the best professionals/creatives/go-getters they can be! Also — we’d like to send out a huge thanks to HBO sponsoring the event.

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Conference organizer, founder of WSC, and winner of all hair awards ever, Rebecca Miller Webster kicks off the conference with an intro about WriteSpeakCode and the plans for the day.
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“I’m an expert at…” attendees practice their 30 second pitch of what they are an expert at.
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Pace student Mariana Gomes da Motta Macedo and Caria Souza from Spotify were speaking in Portuguese about technology around the world!
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Ladies from HBO Careers represent Pied Piper for Silicon Valley
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Attendees created a timeline of their goals for the next month, 3 months, 6 months and 1 year
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Attendees were able to network with other women in tech from around the city!
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All ages were welcome!

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Seidenberg Research Teams Awarded Best Paper Recognition

At the annual Conference on Information Systems Applied Research (CONISAR), A Research Study of Cloud Computing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in Financial Firms was awarded 2012 Distinguished Paper Award; and at the annual concurrent Information Systems Educators Conference (ISECON), A Comprehensive Research Survey on Cyberbullying Perceptions at a Major Metropolitan University (i.e. Pace University) – Faculty Perspectives was awarded 2012 Meritorious Paper Award.

At the annual Conference on Information Systems Applied Research (CONISAR), A Research Study of Cloud Computing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in Financial Firms was awarded 2012 Distinguished Paper Award; and at the annual concurrent Information Systems Educators Conference (ISECON), A Comprehensive Research Survey on Cyberbullying Perceptions at a Major Metropolitan University (i.e. Pace University) – Faculty Perspectives was awarded 2012 Meritorious Paper Award.

 

The Cloud Computing paper, a 9 month study involving industry survey and case study, was authored by Dr. James Lawler and Dr. Anthony Joseph of the Seidenberg School, Ms. H. Howell-Barber, an associate of the Seidenberg School Board of Advisors, and Ms. Supriya Desai, a former graduate student of the Seidenberg School.

 

The Cyberbullying paper, a 6 month study involving survey at the university, was authored by Dr. John C. Molluzzo and Dr. Lawler of the Seidenberg School.

 

The papers were awarded recognition from over 100 papers presented competitively at the conferences.

 

The conferences were held in New Orleans in November.
The Seidenberg School congratulates Dr. James Lawler, Dr. Anthony Joseph, Ms. Howell-Barber, Ms. Supriya Desai and Dr. John C Molluzzo.

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