Vegas or Bust: Trustwave is Heading to Black Hat

The Trustwave gang is heading out to Sin City next week for the 17th annual Black Hat USA 2014 conference, a show that amasses many of the world's brightest researchers for two days of riveting talks known as the Black Hat Briefings.

Our SpiderLabs team is presenting two talks: "Bitcoin Transaction Malleability Theory in Practice" (Daniel Chechik and Ben Hayak, 10:15 to 11:15 a.m., Aug. 7, South Seas CD) - which will examine the susceptibly crypto currency exchanges have to users altering transaction identifiers - and "ModSecurity" (Ryan Barnett, 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Aug. 7, Breakers JK - Station 4), which will discuss the widely used open-source web application firewall of which Trustwave is the primary custodian. Meanwhile, our researcher Robert Rowley will be at DefCon to present "Detecting and Defending Against a Surveillance State" (1 to 2 p.m., Aug. 8, Track 1).

Away from the Briefings, Black Hat provides us one of those rare opportunities to converse with a global mix of security professionals who are in the trenches every day, battling threats and dealing with various pressures. Hearing about your struggles and pain points helps us create better products and services for your organization. And we love having the opportunity to tell you what we are up to.

We invite you to join us Aug. 6 and 7 at Booth #241. Throughout those two days, we'll have a number of presentations ongoing, including an overview of our annual landmark study, the Trustwave Global Security Report. You can also learn about the importance of testing applications, and two of our SpiderLabs researchers will introduce you to hacking embedded systems - devices in which computers are embedded into the hardware itself and which have come under fire in recent years over their vulnerability to attack. In addition, attendees can demo our flagship cloud and managed services portal known as TrustKeeper.

And we know how important it is to keep you nourished. We'll be serving up delicious sliders on Wednesday and - in the likely event you need a hangover cure after those late-night parties - breakfast sandwiches on Thursday. Also we're giving away our well-known SpiderLabs T-shirts.

Below is a complete schedule of our booth activities. We hope to see you in the desert!

Dan Kaplan is manager of online content at Trustwave and a former IT security reporter and editor.