First attendance to an OWASP chapter meeting.

Yesterday June the 22nd I was able to attend my first ever OWASP SF chapter meeting at the SF Federal Reserve. Overall, it was a pretty cool meet up. I really enjoyed that the meeting was at the federal reserve building because on entry and exit to the meeting you really got to see the reserves security practices in real time. When we arrived we had to wait for a large enough group to be checked in and escorted to the conference room. They did not take security lightly and even stopped us all and required that we all wear our badges above the waist and visible. Once we were in the conference room, there was the usual IT diet (Pizza and Soda) and it was somewhat social which is always cool for networking.
There were two talks presented during the meeting. The first talk was presented by Jeremy Brotherton on "Analyzing Web Malware" which I found quite interesting because he went into depth on the exploitation of the recent Trend Gumblar which I have previously posted on(here and here). The talk focused on decompiling the Flash file that was used as the method of exploitation for gumblar which was very interesting for me being that I have never really dove into the actual cause of exploitation.
The second talk was by Dave Maynor on "Threats on the Go-Go, Web Threats to Mobile Devices". This was an eye opening discussion on Mobile Devices and the false assumption that all mobile devices are secure. The discussion was very interesting and will definitely motivate me to keep an eye out on Mobile Devices and their current state of security.

I think it would be beneficial during these meetings to go back elementary school style and have some time to randomly sit with peers and be able to introduce yourself and talk about current topics. I think that one of the greatest aspects of these meetings is to network and meet other professionals in your field of study. Living in Napa, it is quite difficult to meet other security professionals and to sit down and throw ideas back and forth.

Until the next meeting.