BarCamp Stuttgart 2019 (#bcs12)

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BarCamp Stuttgart #12This weekend Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th of September the 12th yearly BarCamp Stuttgart took place again. As usual the event communications happens via twitter, see https://twitter.com/bcstuttgart hashtag #bcs12. I had paused for 5-6 years since last attending BCS. While the topic focus has shifted a bit since that time, it became more open and non-technical IMHO, it had been a really interesting and enjoying event again. I had the impression that this event is a place where some of the most motivated and engaged people from Stuttgart meet once a year. 

As usual, the topics on the open BarCamp had been very diverse but there were many new inputs and things to learn. The most technical session was probably on the Python scripting language, that answered some of the questions I had from my fight with python 2 versus 3 and virtualenv.
While the most physical and practical session has been Augen-Yoga:

A bit worrying is that the number of participants declined from last year’s 250. The Hospitalhof could have easily hosted more participants. So is the format of a BarCamp out of vogue eventually? It would be a pity as the organisation team did a great job again and in the contrary the BarCamp format could be used as a hack to the culture of a company potentially. No other format of event is so open, free and basic democratic that it could be an alternative or addition to corporate management updates or question and answer sessions.

So join next year again when BarCamp is again in Stuttgart or anywhere else!

BSides Stuttgart 2019

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This post is a bit delayed, on the weekend, 25th and 26 of May, the first BSides Stuttgart took place in the Wizemann location. I was lucky to have been there, because after monitoring the site months and weeks before, there was no program published and no way to buy tickets. But when looking on it 2 weeks before again, it was already sold out. As this was, as you can see, a Bosch-organized event, I still managed to get listed as a guest, thanks to dear colleague from Bosch CC. 

Security BSides conferences were originally a way to give those a platform whose presentations had been reject by the large conferences like DefCon or BlackHat, but in the mean time this is a grass-roots DIY conference format world-wide. And the contents are not second class in any way, in the contrary as this event has demonstrated!

BSides Stuttgart as the first of its kind in Stuttgart in 2019 took place in the previous industrial facility Wizemann co-working space. Same place as a digitalisation hackathon form Bosch before, just smaller. Great atmosphere and well prepared by CC security people from Bosch.

Co-organized by the ASRG (Automotive Security Research Group) and being hosted in Stuttgart, the event was pretty automotive oriented in general. BUT there was a general track with interesting presentations on cyber security in general. As you can image, this was the track I’ve been mostly following. 

Many colleagues from Bosch PSIRT and CERT and other (automotive) Bosch GBs attended the conference together with people from other companies such as Daimler.

These are the topics I had attended and are noteworthy on day 1:

  • How does ASCII and Unicode affect our Security
    Very interesting presentation on how Unicode and Punycode tricks can be used for DNS squatting and opening vulnerabilities for buffer overflows
  • Elastic Stack for Security Monitoring in a Nutshell
    Workshop on using ELK and Beats to build a SIEM more powerful than commercial products
  • OpSec++ the FastTrack
    Security testing using OSSTMM methodology
  • Cyber Threat Intelligence for Enterprise IT and Products
    A presentation from @Wagner Thomas Daniel (Bosch PSIRT)form PSIRT on a concept for product CTI
  • Weaponizing Layer 8
    How to treat users not as DAU but involve them into building a security culture in the organization.
  • Introduction to Osquery
    Very interesting workshop on osquery a service that exposes system information such as processes, filesystems, etc. via a SQLliste-compatible SQL interface. Also works with docker (as a companion to Sysdig?) and spits out logs.

On the second day, the sunny Sunday, I’ve been listening to the following presentations:

  • What to log? so many events, so little time
    On a tool from a Microsoft lady to catalog and filter the many events that the Windows OS produces with mapping to MITRE Att@ck techniques. Interesting approach and using sigma for generating SIEM queries for the relevant events. 
  • Security Onion
    Workshop on Security Onion, a Linux distribution specially for security monitoring, forensics and incident response, just like Kali is for pentesting.
    Included some real-live example how an attack could be detected and handled based on network logs using the various tools bundled in the distribution.
  • NoSQL Means no Security?
    Insights on the security posture and evolution of MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch. This will get us some ideas on hardening our NoSQL databases potentially.
  • Scale your Auditing Events
    Again from Elastic but on the Linux auditd sub-system and how to process its audit events with Auditbeat and Elastic stack for security monitoring.

Slides have been published on a bsidesstuttgart gitlab site or are posted on the bsidesstuttgart twitter. 

I’ve learned so many new tools, and new information especially in the areas of network security and security monitoring for getting OpSec started.

What’s pretty sure is that BSides Stuttgart will continue next year, maybe growing and giving also you a chance to grep a seat. I’s cool that we finally have a cheap and open security conference right here in Stuttgart, thanks to the organizers from Bosch for the great event! See you there next year, mark your calendar already for May 14 -16 2020!