• 2010 CISSP Final Review

• The Raleigh ISSA Chapter will hold an (ISC)2 CISSP Exam Study Group over three study sessions. You can register on line for the Study Group using PayPal. Each session will be led by CISSP-certified Raleigh ISSA Chapter members. The Study Group will meet at the McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University, on the following dates:

  • Saturday, March 13th
  • Saturday, March 20th
  • Saturday, March 27th

  Class schedule:

  •  8:00 AM - Breakfast
  •  8:15 AM - Class starts
  • 12:15 PM - Lunch
  •  1:00 PM - Class resumes
  •  3:30 PM - Class ends

  The cost for all three sessions is only:

  • $100 for ISSA Members
  • $200 for Non-Members

  Click here to Register for the CISSP Study Group Today!

  Required student resources:

  • Study Book: CISSP Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, 4th/5th Edition
  • Free Quiz: See the Free Practice Tests Web site.
  • Forum: See the CCCure Web site for answers to your questions and more.

  For more information, please contact the Raleigh ISSA Chapter Director of Education.

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  CarolinaCon Is Back! - March 19th-21st, 2010
  
  InfoSec professionals, h4x0rs, script kidz, posers, and government spies:
  
  "CarolinaCon" is back yet again! Yes, for about the price of your average movie admission with popcorn and a drink, YOU are invited to join us for yet another intimate and informative weekend of technology education.

• What is this "CarolinaCon"?
  
  CarolinaCon is an annual Technology Conference whose mission/purpose is to:
  • Enhance local and global awareness of current technology issues anddevelopments,
  • Provide affordable technology education sessions to the unwashed masses,
  • Deliver varied/informative/interesting presentations on a wide variety of InfoSec/hacking/technology/science topics, and
  • Mix in enough entertainment and side contests/challenges to make for a truly fun event
• 
  When/Where is CarolinaCon?
  
  This year's event will be held on the weekend of March 19th-21st, 2010. The event will occur at at the Holiday Inn on Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh, North Carolina. Raleigh is about 30 minutes from Durham, Chapel Hill, and Research Triangle Park.
• 
  Who develops/delivers CarolinaCon?
  
  CarolinaCon is proudly brought to you by "The CarolinaCon Group". The CarolinaCon Group is a non-profit organization registered in the state of NC, dedicated to educating the local and global communities about technology, information/network/computer security, and information rights. The CarolinaCon Group is also closely associated with various "2600" chapters across NC, SC, TN, VA, LA, DC, and NY. Many of the volunteers who help develop and deliver CarolinaCon come from those chapters.
• 
  What events will be at CarolinaCon?
  
  CarolinaCon is mainly about the talks/presentations/demos. Alongside of those we'll surely have several other technology-related contests/challenges, as we've had in past years.
• 
  Who will be presenting which topics this year?
  
  We Don't Need No Stinking Badges - Shawn Merdinger
  Locks: Past, Picking, and Future - squ33k
  Cybercrime and the Law Enforcement Response - Thomas Holt, Professor Farnsworth
  You Spent All That Money and You Still Got Owned - Joe McCray
  Something Smells Phishy: The Evolution of Social Engineering - Chris Silvers, Dawn Perry
  It's Not A Vulnerability, It's A Feature - Deral Heiland
  The Search for the Ultimate Handcuff Key - TOOOL
  The Art of Software Destruction - Joshua Morin, Terron Williams
  How the Droid Was Rooted - Michael Goffin
  Smart People, Stupid Emails - Margaret McDonald
  Mitigating Attacks with Existing Network Infrastructure - Omar Santos
  OMG, The World Has Come To An End!!! - FeloniousFish
  Physical Manifestation of Software: Microcontrollers 101 - Nick Fury
  Protecting Systems through Log Management and System Integrity - David Burt
  Why Linux is Bad for Business - wxs
  Hacking with the iPhone - snide
  Metasploit - Ryan Linn
  
• For a schedule of all talks and their times check out http://www.CarolinaCon.org

April Chapter Meeting - Thursday, April 8, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: Carolina Advanced Digital

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

May Chapter Meeting - Thursday, May 6, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: Kaspersky Lab

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

June Chapter Meeting - Thursday, June 3, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: NCSU Department of Computer Science

Location: NCSU Computer Science Engineering Building II, Room 1231 in Raleigh, on the campus of NC State University.

              NOTICE! This is NOT our usual McKimmon Center meeting location!

Presentation: Blocking Stealthy Malware Attacks - Countering Kernel Rootkits with Lightweight Hook Protection

Kernel rootkits have posed serious security threats due to their stealthy manner. To hide their presence and activities, many rootkits hijack control flows by modifying control data or hooks in the kernel space. A critical step towards eliminating rootkits is to protect such hooks from being hijacked. However, it remains a challenge because there exist a large number of widely-scattered kernel hooks and many of them could be dynamically allocated from kernel heap and co-located together with other kernel data.

In addition, there is a lack of flexible commodity hardware support, leading to the so-called protection granularity gap – kernel hook protection requires byte-level granularity but commodity hardware only provides page-level protection. To address the above challenges, in this paper, we present Hook-Safe, a hypervisor-based lightweight system that can protect thousands of kernel hooks in a guest OS from being hijacked. One key observation behind our approach is that a kernel hook, once initialized, may be frequently read-accessed, but rarely write-accessed.

As such, we can relocate those kernel hooks to a dedicated page-aligned memory space and then regulate accesses to them with hardware-based page-level protection. We have developed a prototype of Hook-Safe and used it to protect more than 5,900 kernel hooks in a Linux guest. Our experiments with nine real-world rootkits show that Hook-Safe can effectively defeat their attempts to hijack kernel hooks. We also show that Hook-Safe achieves such a large-scale protection with a small overhead (e.g., around 6% slowdown in performance benchmarks).

Presenter: Dr. Xuxian Jiang

Dr. Jiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2006 and his M.S. in Computer Science from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China in 2001. His research interests include virtual machines and security . Further information about Dr. Jiang is available on his site, here.

For greater insight into Dr. Jiang's research, read the recent NC State News article, High Profile ITSec Research.

July Chapter Meeting - Thursday, July 8, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

August Chapter Meeting - Thursday, August 5, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

September Chapter Meeting - Thursday, September 2, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

October Chapter Meeting - Thursday, October 7, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

November Chapter Meeting - Thursday, November 4, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD

December Chapter Meeting - Thursday, December 2, 2010, at 6:00 PM

Sponsored By: TBD

Location: McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North Carolina located on the campus of NC State University.

Presentation: TBD

Presenter: TBD