Go South: Barcelona Cybersecurity Monthly Meeting (January 2019)
After visiting freezing Estonia and Finland, we came to the capital city of Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Catalunya government has already been deploying PoC that utilizes blockchain to trade energy by photovoltaic power generation. Moreover, some organizations are trying to use blockchain and cryptocurrency for their autonomy relating to independent movement. And last year in Barcelona, a blockchain hub Pier02 has been inaugurated by Barcelona Tech City. They are keen to follow the blockchain scene.
On 29th January there was Barcelona Cybersecurity monthly meetup at the office of Typeform. Barcelona Cybersecurity is a non-profit organization that is run by some healthy volunteers and they constantly have their event which takes place in the different tech company each time. Typeform, which offers online form service for data collection, hosted the venue this time.
The first talk was by Alejandro Ortuno, Security Architect at Typeform. He talked about a custom built tool using AWS Steps to monitor and alert any changes on the external surface of attack to all our cloud services. This tool may be the solution for reducing the possible risk of various uses of cloud services.
The second talk was “Compromising online accounts by cracking voicemail systems” by Martin Vigo who is Product Security Lead at Salesforce. He discussed the impact of gaining unauthorized access to voicemail systems which are not well-known commonly, and introduced the way to automate the process.
Nowadays SIM hijacking is practical threat. And Martin demonstrated and raised alarm on the potential risk of verification process via SMS that becomes common method used by many web service.
After the tallks, time for pizzas and drinks. Some of them were local engineers, students, researchers, and various stake holders in the field of cybersecurity.
This time Typeform hosted and offered their conference room for this event. Though Typeform is not a cybersecurity company, it is good for the companies to host this sort of event to have the place for networking. Because they could be known by local engineers at least and have some connection that can facilitate the future collaboration.
