Vertek Sponsors 5th Annual North Country Cybersecurity Conference

October 13^th, 2023

Organized by Professor Christian Balan, Coordinator of the Center for Cybersecurity at SUNY Plattsburgh

Vertek was a proud sponsor of the 2023 North Country Cyber Security Conference held at SUNY Plattsburgh. Members of the Vertek team Japhid Moses and Elizabeth Meraz attended the yearly event that hosted numerous business and technical presentations. This conference is a forum where students, alumni, and professionals from across the industry can gather to share industry information and uplift the next generation of security professionals.

Keynote – Jesse Adam – MS-ISSAC Services

Jesse Representing the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center presented on their role of disseminating security information and services to Local, State and Territory Institutions. This discussion covered the threat landscape including the continued evolution of ransomware and the future of threat actors with access to generative Artificial Intelligence.

David Traill – Fortinet – Advantages on Cybersecurity Mesh

David Presented the advantages of Fortinet’s security suite. He showcased the advantages of integrated products in conjunction with the need for security services to be agile and holistic.

Kevin Giel – Grey Castle Security – “PowerShell scripting for security”

Kevin performed a live demonstration on using PowerShell as a tool for performing investigations in Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. This talk covered the technical fundamentals of account hygiene and strategies for related incident response.

Women in Tech Lunch –

This lunch event discussed gender diversity in the cybersecurity field with a panel of women in various stages of their careers and the routes that they took to get there. Special focus was paid to the advantages of mentoring in the field.

Marc Balingit – Cybrary – Threat Hunting: Hunt or be Hunted

Marc talked about threat hunting strategy, using the “Pyramid of Pain.” This framework focuses on the best indicators we can flag to make life hard for bad actors. Tools, Tactics, Techniques and Procedures are excellent indicators as they are the least likely to change from campaign to campaign. Mitigating tools and TTPs in this way can make it so a threat actor cannot leverage their core competencies. This strategy was through the lenses of the medical field and its related common threats.

Trent Delor – AWS (Amazon Web Services) – Making and Breaking Cloud Security

Trent presented on AWS Permission and Trust policy. He highlighted the advantages of role-based authentication and permissions in addition to the common pitfalls therein. Trent followed this with a demonstration of best practices in avoiding and mitigating Inline Policy Overload, Confused Deputy Attack and Overly Permissive policies.

Marisa Atkinson – Flashpoint – Reverse Engineering and YARA Rules

Marisa discussed the finer points of malware analysis with a special focus on YARA rules and their use in security technology in addition to leveraging open-source intelligence to break down malware processes. The tools and techniques that she leverages are used to identify “matches” in malicious traffic, which are then published into YARA rules. These are used by a wide array of services for malware and threat detection.

Once again, an excellent convention from the Center for Cybersecurity at SUNY Plattsburgh. We are looking forward to next year!

For more information on this event:

https://www.plattsburgh.edu/about/centers/cct/cybersecurity-conference.html