Information Security Webinars

Welcome! This page is the place to learn about upcoming webinars related to information security and provide links to the recording of past webinars (as allowed).  We hope these webinars help to inform you as well as invite you to learn more about keeping information secure.    If you have questions or suggestions for upcoming webinars, please email [email protected].  

UVA Netbadge login required with most sessions.  If the recording is available, please click the event title to view it.

This Month's Event

Due to summer vacations and upcoming Back-to-School events, this ongoing, monthly webinar series will not be held in July and August 2021. The webinars will resume the last Wednesday in September 2021.

 

Past Events

How to Apply Machine Learning Analytics to Detect and Prevent Malicious Attacks

Webinar Date:  June 30, 2021
Time:  1:00 p.m. to 2:30p.m. (EDT)
Presented by Douglas Austin and Tyler Williams.

Bring your questions and we will discuss how to apply machine learning analytics to detect and prevent malicious cybersecurity attacks, fraud, and more.

Douglas Austin is an enterprise solution architect with SAIC, and has worked in cyber security since its infancy circa 1999. Doug’s involvement in computing systems dates back to his undergraduate years at William & Mary (‘91). 

Prior to his current role as a product manager at SAIC, Doug has worked in IT with law firms, financial services, and since 1998, federal contracts. With SAIC, Doug grows SAIC’s managed security services portfolio. Less than a year ago,  Doug and Tyler Williams started working together to take Tyler’s invention, AbnorML, to market with more customers. Tyler is SAIC’s Inventor and the Lead Data Scientist developing this product.

Tyler will demonstrate AbnorML, SAIC’s user behavior analytics (UBA) engine.  They will both share some lessons learned on the journey from concept to product.  Doug will share thoughts around product management, including some challenges encountered doing this in the competitive Federal landscape.  Tyler will demonstrate the analytic system and share the anatomy of a complex cybersecurity attack that is successfully mitigated by utilizing unsupervised machine learning algorithms.

A League of Extraordinary Machines: The First Steps to Autonomous Cyber Reasoning Systems presented by Jack Davidson. 

Webinar Date:  May 26th, 2021
Time:  1:00 p.m. to 2:00p.m. (EDT)
[If you need access to the transcript version of this webinar, please email us at [email protected] ]

In November 2013, DARPA announced the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC). The challenge was to build an autonomous cyber reasoning system that could analyze software, identify vulnerabilities, formulate patches and deploy them on a network, all in real-time.  To test these capabilities, the cyber reasoning systems would face off against each other in a cyber version of capture the flag (CTF), with the winning team receiving a $2M cash prize. 104 teams from across the world entered the competition and began designing and building the supercomputers necessary to compete.

On August 4, 2016, at DEFCON 24 in Las Vegas, Nevada, an audience of 22,000 watched seven extraordinary machines compete in a historic, first-ever machine vs. machine CTF contest. In this talk, I will describe the CGC competition, present some of the unique challenges faced by the teams, and provide an overview of technologies used to address these challenges. I will also present an analysis of the telemetry collected during the CGC final event. In light of recent events, I will argue, now more than ever,  the future of cybersecurity is in autonomous detection and response.

Jack W. Davidson is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. He joined the faculty in 1981 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Davidson's research interests include compilers, programming languages, computer architecture, embedded systems, and computer security. He is the principal investigator of several ongoing projects to develop comprehensive methods for protecting software from compromise. He was also a principal member of TechX, a team selected to compete in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge. He is currently the principal investigator of a $9M DARPA project, Cyber Hunting at Scale (CHASE), whose goal is to develop advanced network defenses to thwart advanced cyber attacks.

Professor Davidson is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Life Fellow of the IEEE Computer. 

Social Media Safety - Threats Around the Corner and In Our Homes presented by Living Security

April 28, 2021 11 a.m . to 12:00 p.m. (EDT)
Social media connects us with friends and gives us a platform to share our lives. But a friend of a friend doesn’t equal someone you can trust. Especially when it is someone that you haven’t met personally. Just think of how much rapport and experience it takes for you to give someone from your own workplace a recommendation.  In this informative webinar you’ll learn more about:
- Why your kids should only connect with and interact with people they’ve met and trust personally
- Why they should never meet up in person with someone that they have only met through social media
- Why it is critical to keep even innocent information private, someone finding out what school you attend can easily identify your address
- Guide your kids to always think before they post. Once something is online, they can’t take it back.

Keep Your Web Browsing to Yourself presented by Tony Townsend

March 24, 2021 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (EDT)
The web browser on your computer may be used more than any other app you have. Do you know how to keep your private information secure? How about stopping websites from tracking your movements? And what the heck are cookies anyway? This mini-course can assist you in securing your web browser and enhancing your online privacy.

Tony Townsend is a senior systems analyst with UVa’s Information Security and has worked in computer support since 1980. He has a lifelong interest in making technology understandable and accessible to everyone.

Let's Talk About Web Security presented by Adam Arrowood

February 17, 2021 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. (EST)
Let’s Talk About Web Security, presented by Adam Arrowood focused on the risks and defenses for web-based applications.  This webinar includes an in-depth look at spam as an indication of compromise.  Web application security is the process of protecting websites and online services against security threats that exploit vulnerabilities in an application’s code. Colleges and universities are prime targets for hackers simply because their networks have access to a large amount of private information, including educational and medical records, as well as employee and student data.

Mr. Arrowood works for the Cyber Security team of the Office of Information Technology of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA.  As a Lead Information Security Engineer, he is involved in cloud and web-related security.  Prior to working in cybersecurity, he spent many years developing web applications and managing web hosting environments.