Hugo Gonzalez is a full member of the Honeynet Project, and now is pursuing his PhD at University of New Brunswick, working at the Information Security Centre of Excellence. His research interest include Malware Authorship Attribution, Android Malware and Application Layer DoS attacks.

What was your motivation to enter Information Security field, and who inspired and helped you along the way?

I started in the Linux world because a speaker in a local conference. Then I discovered the network and then network security while helping at the University IT Lab. Since then, information security became a passion. Joining The Honeynet Project helped me to understand the big landscape of infosec.

Per Thorsheim is the founder & main organizer of Passwordscon, the worlds first and only conference about passwords and digital authentication. After pwning a Fortune 500 in a day because of a lazy sysadmin using “Password” as his password 16 years ago, Per has been researching the security and usability of the one security technology that pretty much everyone uses every single day.

1. What was your motivation to enter the Information Security field, and who inspired and helped you along the way?

I read about the Chaos Computer Club somewhere in the 80’s when playing around with a C64 and Amiga 1000, but running SATAN on an SGI system in 94-95 really sparked the professional interest.

The submission deadline for the Forensic Challenge 14 – “Weird Python“ put up by Thomas Chopitea and Maximilian Hils has passed. We have received 14 submissions totaling to more than 200 pages. Thanks to our workshop team, we are happy to announce the winners who will get tickets for the Honeynet Workshop in Stavanger!

Here are the most excellent submissions:

1. Lucas McDaniel: Unable to attend the workshop
2. Miroslav Stampar: Ticket for the full workshop (3 days), including 3 nights of hotel (Value: ~3000 USD)
3. Gael Muller: Ticket for the full workshop (3 days) (Value: 2450 USD)
4. Matthew Fata: Unable to attend the workshop
5. Barun Kumar Basak: Unable to attend the workshop
6. Marcin Szymankiewicz: Two tickets for the first day (Value: 1380 USD)
7. Dalibor Dukic & Hrvoje Spoljar

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to the other participants! For everyone interested, we published a crowd-sourced write-up on the challenge page. Also, thank you for the extremely positive feedback we received on the challenge design. We’re looking forward to meeting you in Stavanger!

Kai Roer is focusing on user awareness, security culture and the study of how our human mind makes us vulnerable and exploitable. He consults with people and organizations on the interpersonal skills that are vital to a successful and trusted secure environment. He is the creator of the Security Culture Framework, a columnist at Help-Net Security and the author of a number of books about cybersecurity and leadership. His latest book is “Build a Security Culture”.

Lance Spitzner, founder of the Honeynet Project, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of cyber threat research and security training and awareness. He has helped develop and implement numerous multi-cultural security awareness programs around the world for organizations as small as 50 employees and as large as 100,000. Lance invented and developed the concept of honeynets, and has authored several books and security whitepapers.

We met him today and spoke about the current information security landscape and the upcoming Honeynet Workshop that will be held in Stavanger, Norway from May 18th to May 20th.

This year, the annual Honeynet Project Workshop 2015 event will be sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. In anticipation of the event, we did an exclusive interview with André Vorbach (IT-Security Expert) and Markus Schmall (Vice President IT Security) to find out how Deutsche Telekom is getting involved and what they see as the hot topics at this year’s workshop.

HNP: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview with us today. So, how important is an event like the Honeynet Project Workshop for knowledge sharing and growing your global network in the IT sector?

After a tense few days of waiting, which is always the most stressful part of GSoC for mentoring organizations and org admins, 19:00 UTC today was the moment of truth when some lucky orgs found out that they were accepted for GSoC 2015, and other orgs sadly discovered that they would not be taking part.

After missing GSoC 2014 we were particularly tense, but the great news is that we are very pleased to announce that The Honeynet Project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for GSoC 2015. Woohoo! It is going to be another exciting summer… :-)

In the first part of this two part blog post, the issue of anticipating retaliation during an aggressive battle to wrest control of a DDoS botnet was examined. In this part, the issues of dual standards, taking responsibility, and learning lessons to make positive change over time are examined.

Read full post here…

With winter in the northern hemisphere beginning to turn into spring, it is once again time to think about summer. And of course, for many open source organizations, that means Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

After successfully participating in GSoC between 2009 and 2013 to create or extended many honeynet technologies that have gone on to become industry standard tools, we are very happy to annouce that The Honeynet Project has applied to be a mentoring organization in GSoC 2015.

This blog post is the first of a two-part series in response to the Wired article of Oct 14, 2014, “How Microsoft Appointed Itself Sheriff of the Internet.” [McM14] I find some problems with this article that raise questions about the depth of research into some elements of the story, and an appearance of bias in how “unintended consequences” are presented.

[McM14] Robert McMillan. How Microsoft Appointed Itself Sheriff of the Internet. http://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/, October 2014.