Debate: "Private Companies Should Be Authorized To Take Measured Offensive Action Against Attackers"

On Feb. 8-9, 2013, up to 100 people including some of the world's leading experts in law, incident response, reverse-engineering and intelligence will meet in Washington DC to debate the topic: "Private Companies should be Authorized to take Measured Offensive Actions against Attackers". The list of speakers includes CrowdStrike's Dmitri Alperovich, Mandiant's Richard Bejtlich, Microsoft's Dave Aucsmith, Dambala Labs' Gunter Ollmann, CrySys Labs' Boldi Bencsath, ReVuln's Donato Ferrante, INTERPOL's new Digital Crime Center's director, the ITU's Marco Obiso, The Grugq, The Jester, and many more.

The Agenda of Suits and Spooks DC will feature the most intriguing panel discussions every held on the highly controversial issue of "striking back" at those responsible for cyber attacks as well as how offensive markets for malware are changing the world of vulnerability exploits. The second day will include breakout sessions as well as an afternoon debate between two teams consisting of 12 volunteers from our attendees along with time for research and strategizing over a working lunch.

Friday, February 8, 2013 - Waterview Conference Center

9:00am - Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:45am - Welcome and Briefing on the Day's Activities

10:00am - 12:00pm: Panel Discussion - Offensive Tactics and Takedowns by Security Vendors

Featuring Mr. Dmitri Alperovich (CTO and Co-Founder, Crowdstrike), Mr. Richard Bejtlich (CSO, Mandiant), Mr. David Aucsmith (Sr. Director, Microsoft Institute of Advanced Technologies for Governments), and Mr. Nick Selby (Police Officer, DFW Area Department of Public Safety; Partner, Enterprise Security at N4Struct, Inc.).

12:00pm - 1:00pm: How Duqu, Flame, Gauss, and Shamoon can be reconfigured and reused against different victims

Featuring Dr. Boldizsár “Boldi” Bencsáth (Associate Professor, Laboratory of Cryptography and Systems Security (CrySyS), Department of Telecommunications, Budapest University of Technology and Economics)

1:00pm - 1:45pm LUNCH (provided on-site)

1:45pm - 3:45pm: Panel Discussion - Finding Exploitable Loopholes in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and International Law for Offensive Actions in Cyberspace

Featuring Dr. Catherine Lotrionte (Director of the Institute for Law, Science + Global Security, Georgetown University),  Mr. Stewart A. Baker (Partner, Steptoe & Johnson), Mr. Frank J. Cilluffo, Director, Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, and Mr. Marco Obiso (Cybersecurity Coordinator, International Telecommunications Union (ITU)

3:45pm - 4:00pm BREAK

4:00pm-6:00pm: Panel Discussion - Offensive Markets for Vulnerability Research - Pros and Cons

Featuring Mr. Donato Ferrante (Co-Founder and Security Researcher, ReVuln), The Grugq (a security engineer who specializes in reverse-engineering and anti-forensics), Mr. Gunter Ollmann (Chief Technology Officer, Damballa Labs)

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - Waterview Conference Center

9:00am Continental Breakfast

9:30am Welcome and Briefing on the Day's Activities

9:45am - 10:45am (Classroom A): Calculating The Adversary's Return-On-Investment and How That Can Inform Defense

Featuring Mr. Josh Corman (Director of Security Intelligence, Akamai)  and Mr. David Etue (Vice President, Corporate Development Strategy at SafeNet)

9:45am - 10:45am: (Classroom B): (topic to be announced)

Featuring Mr. Spencer Wilcox (Lead Security Strategist and Special Assistant to the Vice President of Corporate and Information Security Services for Exelon Corporation)

9:45am - 10:45am: (Classroom C): Q&A with The Jester via IRC "Is Offense The Best Defense, and Who Should Conduct It?"

This will be a moderated discussion with The Jester via IRC chat. Attendees will be able to pass their questions to the moderator and The Jester will respond in real-time.

 10:45am - 12:45pm: What's the Downside of Private Sector Offensive Engagement?

Featuring Dr. Anup Ghosh (Founder and CEO at Invincea), Mr. Jeffrey Carr (Founder and CEO, Taia Global, Inc.), Mr. Gunter Ollmann (Chief Technology Officer, Damballa Labs), and Mr. Josh Corman (Director of Security Intelligence, Akamai)

12:45pm-2:00pm: Working Lunch

12 attendees will volunteer to debate the proposition (6 per team). The working lunch will be spent dividing into teams and assisting the debaters in preparing research and debate strategies.

2:00pm - 3:30pm: Debate the Proposition "Private Companies Should be Authorized to Take Measured Offensive Actions Against Attackers"

The debate will be judged by a panel of 5 of our speakers

3:30pm - Closing Remarks

The Waterview Conference Center is one of Washington D.C.'s most beautiful and exclusive facilities but it has a capacity of only 100 people so don't miss out. Register today and be a part of one of 2013's most important events.

We are also still looking for companies to join Basis Technology in sponsoring this important event. Please contact me for more information.

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The Use of Covert Cyber Counter Strikes as Active Defense (and other topics) at Suits and Spooks DC

Waterview Conference Center,  Rosslyn VA

Can the U.S. legally engage in covert cyber counter strikes as a form of active defense against hostile actions by non-state actors in Russia, China or elsewhere? That's one of the forward-looking talks being given at Suits and Spooks DC by Professor Catherine Lotrionte of Georgetown University.

Are tamper-proof chips really tamper proof? Can firmware be extracted from the locked chips such as those used on the captured RQ-170? Travis Goodspeed will show how it can be done on the cheap.

Can a privately funded spy satellite system be used to secure evidence targeting criminal behavior by governments or their officials? Thanks to the work of the Enough Project organization, we know the answer to that question is yes. Jonathan Huston will explain how they did it.

And that's just 3 of our talks. In addition to Catherine, Travis, and Jonathan, Suits and Spooks attendees will interact with:

• Don O'Donnell - Rand Corporation
• Rand Waltzman amd Randy Garrett - DARPA
• Dan Geer - In-Q-Tel
• Anup Ghosh - Invincea

Then from outside of the InfoSec space, reflecting our multi-disciplinary approach, we'll hear talks from:

• Christopher Burgess - Atigeo
• Ben Milne - Dwolla
• Janina Gavankar - Posterous Spaces for Actors
• John Robb - author, Brave New War
• Jodee Rich - CEO, PeopleBrowsr

Every attendee will have an opportunity to ask questions and interact with the speakers in an elegant setting overlooking the Potomac river and the Capital. The entire day will be focused on brain-storming new security solutions that we hope will give birth to a revolution in security affairs. Real-time analysis on a Palantir workspace will be flashed onto a screen behind the speakers and a final report will be issued afterwards to members of Congress and interested agencies.

Pricing includes breakfast, lunch, and a wine reception afterwards:

• Students and academics: $195
• Gov't employees: $295
• Early bird registration: $395
• Standard registration: $495

The early bird registration ends January 6, 2012 and we are capping attendance at no more than 100 individuals, including speakers so reserve your seat today.

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Spontaneous Analysis of Unstructured Speech for Idea Development using Palantir

Sample Palantir Analysis: http://taia.co/rqGYrr

My goal for each Suits and Spooks anti-conference is to tackle a hard challenge with a unique approach. In this case, we're going to use Palantir to navigate and intuite patterns in unstructured human speech instead of unstructured data to find hidden connections and spark creative solutions.

Palantir was created to perform information analysis. We used it 3 1/2 years ago for our open source intelligence experiment called Project Grey Goose. In February, 2012 we're going to reinvent its use by moving from finding "fragments of data which tell a larger story" to finding fragments of ideas presented by speakers and commented upon by attendees. I'm particularly excited about the input from attendees because unlike the standard conference where attendees have to que up before one or two microphones, at SnS every attendee will have a microphone at their seat and will be able to challenge speakers during their 30 minute presentations. Additionally, attendees will be able to send text messages to the Palantir engineer for ingestion into the application. Twitter will be a third source of input by ingesting everything tweeted to @suitsandspooks on the day of the event. We will not only be capturing the remarkable information provided by our speakers but the ideas and feedback that it inspires on the part of our attendees.

Finally, all of those inputs will be linked and analyzed in real time by projecting the Palantir workspace onto a screen behind the speaker podium which will multiply the effect of idea generation as new linkages and conceptual ideas are displayed, added to, spoken about, analyzed and re-displayed repeatedly throughout the day. After the event is over, we'll publish a report containing our findings along with screen shots of the Palantir workspace that will portray how the analysis was done.

10 Days Left For The Early Bird Discount
Register today to be a part of this unique process and interact with the following remarkable individuals who'll be speaking:

• Ben Milne (founder of Dwolla)
• Jonathon Huston (Satellite Sentinel Project)
• John Robb (Brave New War)
• Janina Gavankar (Posterous Spaces for Actors)
• Jodee Rich (founder of PeopleBrowsr)
• Anup Ghosh (founder of Invincea)
• Daniel Geer (In-Q-Tel)
• Rand Waltzman (Darpa)
• (and more to come)

Please support this event with your attendance and with word of mouth. The topic - Shaping a Revolution in Security Affairs - is vitally important as the recent capture of a Top Secret RQ-170 Stealth Sentinel drone so dramatically illustrates. Everyone from the Director of the NSA on down knows that the present system is broken (with the exception of the RSA's of the world). This is your opportunity to be a part of discovering a more effective model. 

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