Epistemology. How’s that for a $6 word? In a nutshell, epistemology is the philosophical study of belief, truth, and knowledge. As it turns out, sometimes the things that we believe aren’t necessarily true… hard to believe, right? In the infosec community, there are many closely held beliefs; strong passwords are important, users are dumb, you can never be 100% secure, defense in depth is a good thing, infosec is relevant, the conversations that happen twitter are valuable, metrics are useless, and many more. However, understanding the underlying truth can be challenging, especially when our beliefs are so entrenched in our community and the definition of what it means to be a modern day hacker. This talk will examine some foundational infosec beliefs and how infosec is viewed by others. Through examples and a little logic, I hope to get us a little closer to the truth underlying our industry. Yes it will be ranty, yes there will be diagrams and charts and things. But hopefully this talk will challenge your beliefs about our industry and how we tackle modern day security problems.

Bruce Potter

Bruce Potter is the CTO and cofounder of Ponte Technologies. Mr. Potter has extensive experience assisting clients who are dealing with advanced threats against their IT infrastructure. Over the last several years, Mr. Potter has lead teams focused on incident response and attack remediation, software development of advanced defensive technologies, and IT security architecture and purchasing strategy. Prior to founding Ponte Technologies, Mr. Potter held several jobs focused on security and network operations including managing advanced security solution delivery for Booz Allen Hamilton managing network and security operations for Network Solutions and CTO for a transaction processing startup in Anchorage, Alaska. Mr. Potter has coauthored a number of books including ” 802.11 Security” and “Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security” published through O’Reilly. Mr. Potter also regularly writes articles and presents at a wide variety of security conferences. Mr. Potter is the founder of The Shmoo Group of security, crypto, and privacy professionals. Through The Shmoo Group, Mr. Potter assists with a number of open source projects and the yearly ShmooCon security conference held in Washington, DC.
 

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