Chances are you are familiar with the phenomenon called Game of Thrones. I expect that everybody who watches the series has a perspective and a preference on the person they wish to sit in the Iron Throne. But let's be honest; only science can forecast the outcome!
On April 4th and 5th I had the honour to participate in the 2019 CyberCentral Summit in Prague. A conference brilliantly organized by Michaela Stranovska and Alexander Nevski of EBCG. It is the first big conference I attend in Prague although this is the city I live in the last five years!!!
The conference was nicely balanced. The content included some very technical presentations such as Milan Pikula's presentation about the lack of security in IoT and Solomon Sonya's "Securing the perimeter - one IDS at a time".
On 26th and 27th of March I was invited to participate in the [Cyber Security for Critical Infrastructure 4.0 https://www.cybersenate.com/new-events/2019/3/26/critical-infrastructure-cyber-security] conference organized by Cyber Senate in Amsterdam. It was a very nice conference, organized brilliantly by Alex Matthews and James Nesbitt. Chris Blask was in charge of the coordination of the conference, and we all enjoyed a nice flow of the talks, panels and breaks.
I am a huge fan of automation; I strongly believe that automation, machine learning and / or artificial intelligence (whatever these terms mean for different people) are our best chance to tackle one of the biggest problems we have in the cyber security industry: the human limitations.
Now that multi factor authentication is gaining ground I thought I would write a simple guide on how to secure administrative access with MFA on Linux systems. The solution is simple and based on Google Authenticator. The good thing with Google Authenticator is that it's a typical TOTP/HOTP solution and as such does not require any internet connectivity on either the server or the client. The configuration examples provided are more or less appropriate for openSUSE Leap 15 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
In September 2018 (ISC)2 announced a Free GDPR course for members. What started as a single free course was very recently rebranded as the Professional Development Institute. The plans are for up to 30 (!!) new courses in 2019.