Minerva Engineering Announces Attendance At ShmooCon 2010, Wardman Park Marriott, Washington DC, February 5 through 7, 2010
Washington, DC - February 4, 2010
Minerva Engineering announced its attendance at ShmooCon 2010, the annual East Coast hacker convention. In an effort to reach out to information security professionals that can sometimes operate outside the normal recruiting and marketing channels, Minerva Engineering will have a booth complete with a challenging contest which will test the skill and abilities of the attendees.
If being a “hacker convention” wasn’t different enough, ShmooCon has always distinguished itself as providing world-class speakers, cutting edge technology and engaging forums for today’s information security minds to meet and exchange ideas. The conference offers three days of technology exploitation demonstrations, inventive software and hardware solutions and open discussions of critical INFOSEC issues. This year, the keynote speakers are Steve Dispensa and Marsha Ray who will be presenting their first hand account and technical details behind the discovery of the TLS Authentication Gap vulnerability. Additional presentations include a fascinating look at maintaining anonymity in today’s internet era where the creators of Anonym.OS bring an abridged guide to becoming [and staying] anonymous. Other discussions focus on dataflow analysis tools, how today’s graphics processor units can give supercomputing CPUs a run for their money, detecting rogue access points and many others (don’t miss the talk on Social Zombies). Featuring network labs, a hacker’s arcade and many more events and contests, this year’s ShmooCon is on track to bring together the best and most talented hackers and security professionals from around the world.
In recent years, Minerva Engineering has become well known in the defense and intelligence community for the talented engineering staff it’s brought to the information security challenges faced by our customers. In 2010, Minerva Engineering is rolling out it’s “Cyber-X” initiative which is aimed at getting the word out to the information security community on the nature and scope of the types of information security services we can provide. “Showcasing our capabilities at ShmooCon makes sense for us as it allows us to reach out to a unique set of individuals and corporations that represent the best the information security community has to provide”, said Robert La Bella, president of Minerva Engineering. “In the spirit of ShmooCon, we plan to offer a challenging contest with a clever back-story that will test the skills and ingenuity of the attendees while offering some fun prizes as a reward for those capable enough to claim them”.
The contest will require that hackers use their skills and knowledge of information security to beat a multi-level and multi-faceted security system. In this contest, the scenario revolves around a hypothetical ex-employee who has stolen critical intellectual property from Minerva Engineering. Help us retrieve the data and the rewards can be yours! The contest was conceived and developed by Jim Elliott and Raphael Mudge, the developer of the Sleep scripting language and After the Deadline, the intelligent software service that checks spelling, style and grammar using neural networks and a statistical language model used by 10 million bloggers worldwide on WordPress.com.
Want to try your hand at the contest even though you’re not attending Shmoocon? Visit our website at https://shmoocon.minervaengineering.com. Here’s a little hint to get you interested:
Test your skill and knowledge of information security and see if you can beat the system. This year, the convention will be streamed live and can be seen globally via the internet at https://www.shmoocon.org/video.html. Come by and see the Minerva Engineering Booth and test your skill or just come by to chat.
Minerva Engineering, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), provides a broad spectrum of services supporting network and information security, information system security engineering, encryption system development and software and hardware vulnerability analysis and hardening for the defense and intelligence community. Minerva Engineering is a private company founded in 1997 and maintains its corporate headquarters in Mesa, Arizona, with offices in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Linthicum, MD, Bristow, VA and Huntsville, AL.