ISSA-LA November 20 Dinner Meeting

Come and network with your friends, make new friends, and hear two amazing speakers. A buffet dinner will be served and drinks will be available.

Please register and pay here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/securing-the-vote-fundamentals-of-election-security-tickets-1002469773077

Topic One: Securing the Vote: Fundamentals of Election Security

An insightful presentation on election security, covering the essential components of an election system and highlighting the key elements necessary to ensure integrity and trust. We’ll explore the attack surface of election systems, identifying potential vulnerabilities and threats. Understanding these risks is crucial for developing strategies to protect not just the democratic process in digitally enabled election systems, but also other information systems and critical infrastructure.

Additionally, we’ll provide a playbook of 10 key focus areas for building a robust cybersecurity program for elections. These insights will help election officials and security professionals enhance their preparedness against cyber threats. This is a great opportunity to learn about a key democratic process and how we protect the vote to ensure fair, transparent elections.

Speaker: Shannon Brewster

Shannon Brewster, CISSP is an Executive Director & General Manager for AT&T leading their cybersecurity consulting and services unit where he leads a global organization comprised of teams of cyber professionals working across all the major domains of Information Security.

Shannon has extensive experience safeguarding critical national infrastructure, including a specialized focus on election security. His collaborations extend to federal, state, and local governments as well as international enterprises. Shannon’s expertise has been essential in helping institutions develop robust cyber programs from the ground up, designing secure and resilient systems, establishing and sustaining continuous monitoring services, engineering for security transformations, vulnerability management, threat hunting and incident response.

Shannon has received a number of industry recognitions, including Security Magazine’s Top Security Leader of 2024, a distinguished Career Achievement Award from Champlain College, and visionary leader award from AT&T. He helped build an elections security program for the largest voting jurisdiction in the United States and he has spoken at many conferences such as the Legislative conference of the National Association of Counties (NACO) and regional summits such as Digital Government, and more.

Shannon has a Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity and a Master of Business Administration from Champlain College in Burlington, VT. He is also an Adjunct Professor for Wilmington University’s College of Technology, teaching for both the graduate and undergraduate cyber programs.

Topic Two: What are Configurations Anyway? And the Wild Ways of Doing Them Wrong

After working with many organizations and various selections of technology stacks, one thing becomes apparent: Configuring is hard. Not just because server software is so complex, but also because of different configuration formats and, at times, multiple areas where configurations sit. In this talk, we are going to touch on configuration files themselves, and the most unintuitive areas or ways to configure software we have seen. These configurations contain many security controls (and dangerous defaults) which should not be overlooked.

Speaker: Albert Heinle

Dr. Albert Heinle is driven by a mission to combat the global surge of data breaches and misconfigurations. Albert co-founded CoGuard in 2020 and serves as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to CoGuard, Albert held development positions at FLIR Systems, Inc., Aeryon Labs and Sortable. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in the area of Symbolic Computation.