Veracode’s Chris Wysopal and Chris Eng recently joined Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Senior Analyst Dave Gruber and award-winning security writer and host of the Smashing Security podcast, Graham Cluley, at Black Hat USA to unveil the findings from a new ESG research report, Modern Application Development Security.

You work hard to produce quality applications on tight deadlines, and like every other development team out there, that often means relying on open source code to keep projects on track. Having access to plug-and-go code is invaluable when you’re racing the clock, but the accessibility of open source libraries comes with a caveat: increased risk.

As organizations continue to adopt DevSecOps, a methodology that shifts security measures to the beginning of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), roles and processes are evolving. Developers are expected to take on increased security measures – such as application security (AppSec) scans, flaw remediation, and secure coding – and security professionals are expected to take on more of a security oversight role.

Solving Puzzles has been a very popular pastime for InfoSec professionals for decades. I couldn’t imagine a DefCon without the badge challenge. At Black Hat 2020 Matt Wixey, Research Lead at PwC UK, didn’t disappoint as he presented on parallels between puzzle-solving and addressing InfoSec problems.

Healthcare providers heavily leverage technology. In his talk, Seth Fogie, information security director at Penn Medicine takes apart different vendor systems at the “fictitious” Black Hat Clinic. Fogie gives a lot of examples and drives home the point that you shouldn’t just look at network security … you have to dig deep into the applications to ensure the security of your data.

Adversarial machine learning (ML) is a hot new topic that I now understand much better thanks to this talk at Black Hat USA 2020. Ariel Herbert-Voss, Senior Research Scientist at OpenAI, walked us through the current attack landscape. Her talk clearly outlined how current attacks work and how you can mitigate against them. She skipped right over some of the more theoretical approaches that don’t really work in real life and went straight to real-life examples. ​

Technology and elections are heavily interrelated – but it wasn’t always that way. We started to adopt technology once we weren’t able to fit everyone into a town hall. The first piece of technology was simply a piece of paper and a ballot box. We may not think of it as technology, but the ballot box can be tampered with. That technology gave us ballot secrecy, a trait that a hand-raise in the town hall didn’t.

In 2011 when IBM’s Watson supercomputer went up against ‘Jeopardy’ icon Ken Jennings, the world watched as a battle of man vs. machine concluded in an impressive win for Watson. It wasn’t simply remarkable that Watson could complete calculations and source documents quickly; the real feat was the brainpower it took to create fine-tuned software with the ability to comprehend questions contextually and think like a human.