Attending Securi-tay 2019: Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
One fine Thursday morning three intrepid doctoral students set out from sunny Southampton, on a mission to discover new wisdom, take part in ancient rituals and gauge the state of the art in all things cyber security. They were heading to Securi-tay 2019, the largest student-lead cyber security conference in Europe, hosted annually by the Abertay Ethical Hacking Society.
To get to Abertay University in Dundee, our three adventurers decided to take a cost effective approach to their travel arrangements. As a result, accidentally drinking warm sugar-free Irn-Bru turned out to be only the second most painful experience of the trip after the journey itself. The modes of transport employed were: a coach trip to London, the tube, a ride by car to Stansted, a short monorail ride, a flight to Edinburgh, a tram ride, and finally a train in to Dundee. Total travel time one way, about 10 hours, total conference time, about 10 hours! Was it worth it? Yes, yes absolutely.
The conference itself was divided into three tracks, other than the opening and closing keynotes and of course the stellar after party. Opening the event we had Nick Murison (@nickmurison) from Synopsys delivering a keynote entitled Software Security: Never Stop Evolving. Central themes for the keynote were the interactions between Security and DevOps teams, the opportunity for security to have an earlier and more impactful relationship with the development cycle and, the associated risks. Thereafter the conference split into three tracks with 18 talks and lightning talks, presented over two sessions. Topics ranged from hardware hacking to CTF design and the offensive use of Natural Language Processing.
One absolutely standout talk was that given by Mike Thompson, Sean Wright and Andy Gill. They focused on the handling of breaches, future improvements in disclosure and redress, and also a significant amount of cowbell! Styling themselves as The Beer Farmers (@TheBeerFarmers), the group uses a comedic approach to great effect, without it detracting from the subject matter. Mike Thompson also managed a Telly Savalas reference, a feat not easily repeated.
To round the day out, the closing keynote dealt with online radicalisation and the technical abilities (or lack thereof) of prominent groups. The presentation was excellent but unfortunately it was one of two talks to carry an embargo. Most of the other talks will eventually be made available for free on YouTube. If all goes well, we will definitely be back in Dundee next year for Securi-tay 2020, though our travel arrangements might be slightly different…
