In this talk, Metasploit collaborators Tod Beardsley and James "Egypt" Lee will discuss the practical considerations of "Cyber Warfare." In the wake of the Sony debacle, the mainstream media of late 2014 through today invariably ask the question, "Is this latest breach a crime, or an act of war?" Egypt and Tod will examine this fundamental question in depth, and consider the ramifications of the answers. Does an active cyberwar inform and influence how network defenses are designed and implemented? How is the art of penetration testing advancing the state of wartime preparedness? How do we get a globally shared Internet on a war footing, or is it already? How do the criminal justice systems align with the need for cultivating offensive and defensive expertise? How does anyone "win" a cyberwar?
Tod Beardsley is the Engineering Manager for the Metasploit Project, the world-renowned open source penetration testing platform. He has over twenty years of hands-on security knowledge, reaching back to the halcyon days of 2400 baud textfile BBSes and in-band telephony switching. Since then, he has held IT Ops and IT Security positions in large footprint organizations such as 3Com, Dell, and Westinghouse. Today, he is passionate (some might say militant) about open source software development, open source security research, and data liberation. He can often be found on Freenode IRC and Twitter as "todb.
egypt is a software developer for Rapid7 where he hacks things with the Metasploit Framework. Before coming to Rapid7, he was a Cybersecurity researcher for Idaho National Laboratory where he discovered numerous vulnerabilities in SCADA and Industrial Control Systems. egypt has presented at Defcon, BSidesLV, Blackhat, Derbycon and other venues. Note that egypt is not Egypt. The two can be distinguished easily by their relative beards -- Egypt has millions, while egypt only has the one.