News

02.09.12 Praetorian hosts University of Texas career information session

UT Students... Please join us on Thursday, February 9th from 7:00-8:00PM for an informative session on career opportunities in information security. The event will be held in the Engineering-Science (ENS) Building, room 116, at 2501 Speedway. Pizza and refreshments served.

01.27.12 InformationWeek & Dark Reading Security Virtual Event

Praetorian's VP of Research and Development, Ryan W. Smith, will join other security professionals on the Getting the Most From Third-Party Security Auditors and Penetration Testers panel at the Clouds, Outsourcing & Security Services event sponsored by Informationweek & Dark Reading on February 15th, 2012. Register now for this free online event.

01.06.12 Praetorian welcomes its newest team member, Matt Starolis

Praetorian is excited to announce that Matt Starolis has joined our ranks. At Praetorian, Matt will be primarily responsible for Praetorian's market expansion and growth. Prior to joining Praetorian, Matt Starolis spent five years at National Instruments as a District Sales Manager covering Northern California's Silicon Valley area. His account focus ranged from Fortune 500 companies to budding and hopeful start-ups, with a significant portion of his business coming from the Military and Aerospace segment. Key accounts included Lockheed Martin, NASA-Ames Research Center, Space Systems/Loral and BAE. Over the years, Matt has been continuously recognized for his sales excellence and was honored as the keynote speaker for NI's Global Sales Conference, nominated as a finalist for the Rookie Salesperson of the Year, and recognized by his peers with the Team Spirit award. Matt is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin where he obtained his BS in Electrical Engineering and worked under the tutelage of distinguished professor and computer architect, Dr. Yale Patt.

12.22.11 Ryan W. Smith to present on STAAF at HICSS 2012

Praetorian's VP of Engineering, Ryan W Smith, is presenting on STAAF (Scaling Android Application Analysis with a Modular Framework) at HICSS 2012. Mr. Smith's research paper on STAAF has officially been nominated for the conference's Best Paper award. For more information, visit the HICSS website.

12.15.11 "The Dragon is Awakening" voted Best Presentation of the Year

Last month, Nathan Sportsman presented on the dramatic escalation of State sponsored espionage to a full-house during ISSA Austin's November meeting. The presentation attracted record attendance-levels and was recently voted "Best Presentation of the Year" by ISSA members. An updated video version of the presentation will soon be available online - Stay tuned.

11.14.11 Nathan Sportsman to present at Austin ISSA meeting on Nov 17, 2011

Praetorian CEO, Nathan Sportsman, is delivering a presentation called "The Dragon is Awakening" to ISSA in Austin, TX on November 17, 2011. The presentation will illustrate how State sponsored espionage has dramatically escalated over the years [China in particular], while explaining how non-conventional solutions are required to combat the growing problem (register to attend).

10.20.11 Praetorian to host annual Security Vault Dinner in Austin, TX

A group of leading Information Security Executives will gather at in Austin, TX on Thursday October 27th to explore top-of-mind security challenges, opportunities and recent successes within their industries. The dinner will be held in Perry's private vault dinning room, which is a converted bank vault complete with an 18-inch steel bank vault door. The annual Security Vault Dinner falls on the eve of LASCON, a premier gathering of Information Security leaders and web application developers in Texas.

09.27.11 Ryan W Smith Presents STAAF at OWASP Austin Meeting

Ryan W Smith presented STAAF, the framework for scalable and shareable Android app analysis, to OWASP Austin today (9/27/2011). In his STAAF Presentation, Ryan covered the framework's architecture, current status and available implementations - as well as a quick demo with a handful of applications.

09.21.11 Daniel Herrera selected to present at LASCON 2011 in Austin, TX

Praetorian's newest team member, Daniel Herrera, has been selected to present at this years LASCON 2011 Conference in Austin, TX on Oct 28th. In his LASCON presentation, Daniel will focus on common obfuscation techniques identified in the wild that function in all modern browsers. The talk is targeted at a technical audience and each technique will be explained with functional examples demonstrating how and why a particular obfuscated method works.

09.07.11 Ryan W Smith selected to present at APPSEC USA 2011

Praetorian's VP of Engineering, Ryan W Smith, has been selected to present at this years APPSEC USA 2011 in Minneapolis (Sept 22-23). In his AppSec session, Ryan W Smith will present his work on S.T.A.A.F. - an efficient distributed framework for preforming large scale android application analysis.

08.01.11 Daniel Herrera Joins Praetorian

Praetorian is excited to announce that Daniel Herrera has joined our ranks. Prior to joining Praetorian, Daniel worked as a security engineer at SecTheory and WhiteHat Security where he specialized in application penetration testing. Mr Herrera has extensive security experience in web related technologies and is a contributing member of the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC). He participated in several projects and has authored content for the WASC Threat Classification v2.0. An avid researcher, his recent analysis and security discoveries in Palm WebOS were reported on by several news outlets including Information Week and Dark Reading. At Praetorian, Daniel will continue research and development of advanced attack techniques against emerging technologies.

07.12.11 Agile Austin Meeting: Building Security into the Next Iteration

Praetorian's Matt Tesauro, OWASP Board Member and WTE Project Lead, to speak at Agile Austin's July 12th meeting. Using the OWASP Web Test Environment (WTE), he will showcase best practices and demonstrate secure methods for designing and testing your software for ruggedness.

06.14.11 Matt Tesauro joins security panel at Austin SecureSDLC

Praetorian's Vice President of Services, Matt Tesauro, will join Michael Howard (Microsoft), Mano Paul, and Wendy Nather (451 Group) on the security panel at Austin SecureSDLC on June 14th.

05.18.11 Ryan W Smith speaks on Mobile Application Privacy

Ryan W. Smith, Praetorian and Tyler Shields, Veracode deliver a highly anticipated webinar that looks under the hood of a huge selection of Android applications and provides a quantitative examination of the application security posture of today's mobile application space.

04.29.11 Nathan Sportsman contributes to NIST SP 800-53 Rev 4

Nathan Sportsman has provided feedback on the next release of NIST special publication 800-53. Proposed changes focused on software assurance and its related controls. The Join Task Force is expected to incorporate contributions later this year.

04.01.11 Ryan W Smith has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor

Ryan will be the primary mentor for a proposed Android Static Malware Analysis project and a secondary mentor on another related Android Dynamic Malware Analysis project. Praetorian is proud to support Ryan's continued work through The Honeynet Project during this year's Google Summer of Code where he will be mentoring a college student through a new project in mobile security.

03.22.11 Adam Pridgen selected as a National Physical Science Consortium Fellow

The Praetorian Team is proud to announce that Adam Pridgen has been selected as a National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) Fellow. The NPSC awards fellowships to outstanding students who are pursuing degrees in Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields and who have shown promise with their past achievements and current academic standings.

03.04.11 Nathan Sportsman quoted on foxnews.com

Nathan Sportsman was quoted in a foxnews article regarding the manipulation of popular search terms to index and return malicious sites in an attempt to distribute malware to unsuspecting users.

03.03.11 Ryan W Smith Prepares for Honeynet Summit in Paris

Ryan W Smith has been invited to speak at the Honeynet Summit held in Paris from March 21st to the 25th where he will discuss his latest mobile malware research with the community.

02.22.11 Matt Tesauro Gives SC World Congress keynote

Matt Tesauro set to give the keynote "Why do vulnerabilities in web apps still linger?" at the SC World Congress eSymposium on February 24, 2011 @ 11:30 CST. The webinar is free and event registration can be done here.

02.14.11 Matt Tesauro Interviewed by InfoQ

InfoQ caught up with WTE project lead Matt Tesauro to learn more about the background, current state, various tools it supports and the future road map of the project.

02.05.11 Matt Tesauro Releases New OWASP Live CD

The most exciting release since its inception! The main goal of the OWASP Live CD, recoined the Web Testing Environment (WTE) project, which is a part of The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) organization, is to make application security tools and documentation available to the application developers and QA testers so the security is built into every aspect of the software development life cycle.

01.28.11 Adam Pridgen Volunteers for KIPP Outreach Program

Today Adam Pridgen participated in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics Day at KIPP Academy Middle School in Southwest Houston. "KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is on a mission to develop in under served students the academic skills, intellectual habits, and qualities of character necessary to succeed at all levels of pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, college, and the competitive world beyond. This is the first year professionals and graduate students were invited to participate in the event, which lasts all day. Adam learned of the opportunity through a posting at Rice, and as part of Praetorian's Outreach Initiatives, he volunteered to speak with sixth graders about computer engineering and computer science. During this event, Adam spent time with sixth graders to talk about what it means to be a computer engineer and computer scientist and the impact these professions will have on the future.

01.13.11 Ryan W Smith Founds Texas-Based Honey Project Chapter

As a show of support for high quality open source and collaborative research, Praetorian's own Ryan W Smith has founded a Texas-based Honeynet Project chapter, The RoT-1 Honeynet Project. Ryan is no stranger to The Honeynet Project. He was an active member of The University of Texas Honeynet Project from 2002-2008 and has spoken on the topic to numerous professional security organizations and government agencies throughout Texas. Many of the other members of the new RoT-1 chapter have also been involved with the Honeynet Project previously including Praetorian's Adam Pridgen, who was also active in The University of Texas Honeynet Project. With such a seasoned and capable member list, the project is expected to hit the ground running and quickly become one of the most active chapters in the project and the project's ambassadors to Texas and the surrounding region. Praetorian is proud to support Ryan and Adam in their involvement with the RoT-1 Honeynet Project Chapter , and their mission "to learn the tools, tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and share the lessons learned."

01.03.11 Greg Genung Joins Praetorian

Praetorian is excited to announce Greg Genung has joined our team. As Vice President of Sales, Greg is responsible for Praetorian's market expansion and growth. Greg will be closely involved with the leadership team to grow the consulting, research, and products practices. Over the last five years, Greg has built strong relationships with CIO's and CISO's in both the public and private sector. His efforts have helped his clients achieve secure, rugged, and resilient enterprise software. Prior to joining Praetorian, Greg was a Business Development Manager for the Denim Group, Ltd. where he led significant sales growth in public Sector and Fortune 500 Market-Entry. His background and experience includes sales, marketing, and brand awareness for new information security service and product segments. Greg currently serves on the Austin OWASP Chapter Board, has served on Austin's ISSA Board since 2008, and also served on the TASSCC TAG Board as Education Director in 2010. Greg is a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

10.29.10 Matt Tesauro Gives Keynote @ OWASP LASCON

Matt Tesauro delivered the keynote "Why does bad software happen to good people?" at OWASP's Lonestar Security Conference. His presentation showed the pervasiveness of software in modern society, demonstrated the implications poorly written software can have, and provided suggestions for a way forward.

10.18.10 Matt Tesauro Joins Praetorian

Praetorian is pleased to announce Matt Tesauro has joined our team. Matt has been involved in the Information Technology industry for more than 10 years. Prior to joining Praetorian, Matt was a Security Consultant at Trustwave's SpiderLabs. Matt's focus has been in application security including testing, code reviews, design reviews and training. His background in web application development and system administration helped bring a holistic focus to Secure SDLC efforts he's driven. Matt is currently on the board of the OWASP Foundation and highly involved in many OWASP projects and committees. Matt is the project leader of the OWASP WTE (Web Testing Environment) which is the source of the OWASP LIVE CD Project and Virtual Machines pre-configured with tools and documentation for testing web applications. He has taught both graduate level university courses and for large financial institutions. Matt has presented and provided training a various industry events including DHS Software Assurance Workshop, AppSec EU, AppSec US, AppSec Academia, and AppSec Brazil. Matt Tesauro has a B.S. in Economics and a M.S in Management Information Systems from Texas A&M University.

08.30.10 OWASP LASCON Sponsorship

Praetorian is proud to announce they are sponsoring the OWASP LASCON 2010 conference held October 29th in Austin, TX. LASCON 2010 is a premier gathering of Information Security leaders and web application developers in Texas. Texas has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state. Executives from these companies along with technical thought leaders, security architects and lead developers gather to share cutting-edge ideas, initiatives, and technology advancements.

08.01.10 Adam Pridgen Speaks @ Defcon 18

Adam Pridgen provided a joint presentation at Defcon 18. The presentation is a case study about an approach to building reverse engineering tools, but in this case, a network bridge between IDA Pro and Debuggers. The presentation will cover the development side of things, and discuss how to leverage open source projects as supplements for code and learning aids, detail useful sources for this type of development, and provide insight about how to build C++ extensions for WinDbg and IDA, as well as building Python plugins for ImmunityDebugger and VDB.

07.12.10 Ryan W. Smith Joins Praetorian

Praetorian is excited to announce Ryan W. Smith has joined our ranks. Ryan's current focus is on the research and development of technology and systems in support of computer network defense, attack, and exploitation. Prior to joining Praetorian, Ryan Smith was an Associate Staff member of the Information Systems Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His previous work at Lincoln Labs was in the code analysis group, in which he focused on the development of a prototype tool to automate the malware analysis process using information flow and virtual machine introspection. Prior to Lincoln Laboratory, Mr. Smith worked at 21st Century Technologies and Applied Research Labs in Austin, TX, and PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas, TX. Previous work has included graph-based network attack correlation, steganography, netflow traffic analysis, vulnerability and risk analysis, and identity management. Ryan received a M.S. in Security informatics from Johns Hopkins, where he focused on network and systems security as well as privacy and technical public policy. He also received a B.S in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas in Austin, where he focused on information assurance and network communications.