Through the Hack the Pentagon program, The Department of Defense (DoD) had asked Synack to look for vulnerabilities left undetected by traditional security solutions in one of their highly complex and sensitive systems. The DoD was going to push the limits of security beyond that of most enterprises, and the results were surprising. Hear from Synack CEO Jay Kaplan how the government can benefit from bug bounty programs, what Hack the Pentagon revealed about DoD security, and why more and more organizations are employing red team penetration testing. 

Jay Kaplan co-founded Synack after serving in several security-related capacities at the Department of Defense, including the DoD’s Incident Response and Red Team. Prior to founding Synack, Jay was a Senior Cyber Analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA), where his focus was supporting counterterrorism-related intelligence operations. Jay received a BS in Computer Science with a focus in Information Assurance and a MS in Engineering Management from George Washington University studying under a DoD/NSA-sponsored fellowship. Jay holds a number of security certifications from ISC(2) and GIAC.

Are you interested in cybersecurity? Have you wanted to learn offensive cyber techniques  but don't know where to get started? The Applied Cybersecurity team is hosting an introductory workshop to get people going with practicing exploitation and offensive cyber techniques in an ethical setting. In particular, we will focus on gaining familiarity with techniques used for competing in Capture the Flag (CTF)* competitions. We'll be hosting the first workshop this Friday, in preparation for the Hitcon CTF next week. Bring a laptop! This workshop will assume no prerequisite experience with hacking or cybersecurity so please attend regardless of how unfamiliar you are with the topic. For this workshop, we will focus on web vulnerabilities, binary reversing, and some basic cryptography challenges. Note that experience equivalent to CS107 will be useful. Food will be provided! RSVP here: https://goo.gl/forms/M5yzuQasIZpL4Ovy1