Coalfire® Announces Sponsorship of OWASP AppSec Capture the Flag Event

Event will showcase complex application security challenges

DENVER—Sept.10, 2014— Coalfire Labs, a division of Coalfire, an independent information technology governance, risk and compliance firm, has announced their sponsorship for the Capture the Flag (CTF) event at OWASP AppSec USA 2014, the premier software security conference for developers, auditors, risk managers, technologists and entrepreneurs.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a nonprofit dedicated to making application security visible by empowering individuals and organizations to make informed decisions about true software security risks. The conference will take place at the Denver Marriott City Center, Sept. 16-19.

“Organizations can fall victim to attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in critical applications and systems; the steady stream of large data breaches explicitly demonstrate this issue.   Software developers and security practitioners come to this conference to share the latest research and learn best practices from experts. We are proud to be a sponsor of such an important event and we think this competition will be a lot of fun,” said Mike Weber, vice president of Coalfire Labs.

WaspNet, an original CTF created by the Boulder OWASP chapter exclusively for AppSec USA 2014, will allow competitors to showcase their talents in a series of application security challenges in order to uncover flags. Challenges can be easy or extremely complex and will take place in an immersive Internet-like sandbox. Once the flags are obtained, competitors will submit them to a central scoreboard to score points for their team and points are based on the difficulty of the challenge. The team with the most points will win prizes at the conclusion of the event.

Contestants must bring their own devices for the Capture the Flag event. These devices will need to include a virtual machine player with at least 1GB RAM and 2 CPU cores, another 1GB+ RAM and 2+ cores for the host system and also appropriate penetration testing tools.

In addition to sponsoring the Capture the Flag event, Brandon Edmunds, security consultant at Coalfire Labs will be teaching a Skills Lab workshop session on advanced application server hacking utilizing the tool “clusterd”. Clusterd was created, supported and published as an open source project to benefit the security testing research community by Coalfire Labs colleague Bryan Alexander. This workshop will occur at 3 p.m., Sept. 18.

Coalfire will be exhibiting at the conference at booth # S3.

To find out more about OWASP AppSec USA 2014, or to register for the conference, visit 2014.appsecusa.org

About Coalfire

Coalfire is a leading, independent information technology Governance, Risk and Compliance (IT GRC) firm that provides IT audit, risk assessment and compliance management solutions. Founded in 2001, Coalfire has offices in Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C. and England and completes thousands of projects annually in retail, financial services, healthcare, government and utilities. Coalfire’s solutions are adapted to requirements under emerging data privacy legislation, the PCI DSS, GLBA, FFIEC, HIPAA/HITECH, HITRUST, NERC CIP, Sarbanes-Oxley, FISMA and FedRAMP.