The rebirth of openSIMS - The presentation and party

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 10:00pm
Location: Union Park - 6th st. Next to Katz's (Austin, TX)

This is a presentation and party co-hosted by GeekAustin and OWASP-Austin. In the front room at Union Park, we’ll have the usual drinks and shenanigans. It the boom boom room, Mando and whurley will have a presentation and discussion on openSIMS. Although openSIMS has a lot of complicated things going on under the hood, Mando and whurley have a knack for expressing it in layman’s terms. The recruiters probably won’t understand it, but they’ll be up front buying drinks for anyone who says they know Java.

openSIMS

If you have any friends/colleagues who do high-level security work, and tell you the tales, you’ve probably heard statistics to the effect that banks and similar institutions are cyber-attacked millions of times each week. You may also have heard that thousands of those attacks are successful. With the growth of hacking and phishing from bored teenager to organized crime groups, this is the reality.

An institution can have teams of the best IT security, firewall, intrusion detection, and forensics experts. They can employ a range of tools: snort, nessus, nmap, nagios, as well as costly enterprise tools. However, when attacked by an army of bots, it frequently isn’t enough. Some attacks succeed.

openSIMS provides a way to integrate Nmap, Snort, Nagios, and Nessus into a common event correlation framework. More importantly, it provides a way for enterprises to selectively share network threat data realtime. Most importantly, openSIMS is an open-source project that is free to install and implement.

If you are interested in hearing about the state of network security (what the folks who hold your online information don’t tell you), and the emergence of the “Community Centric Security” model, I think you will find this an interesting discussion.

Then again, you can also just hang out up front and toss down drinks. Either way, I hope you can make it.

See here for all info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=65797975526