The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

A Practical Introduction to Penetration Testing

Dr. Arno Wacker
University of Kassel, Germany
and UMBC 2017

12:00noon Friday, 28 April 2017, ITE 227, UMBC

While many students learn the theoretical concepts of cybersecurity and cryptology at universities, their exposure to real life systems and the application of learned theoretical foundations in the real world is usually limited. Additionally, most students and sometimes even students of cybersecurity often deal with cybersecurity threats on a very abstract level, thereby being unaware that these threats are not abstract but real for everyone, including for themselves.

Therefore, this talk intends to raise the awareness about real cybersecurity threats for everyone by demonstrating live the process of penetration testing a system. I will show live how an attacker can gain control over a victim’s PC in a matter of seconds, and how this attack can be prevented. To do so, several techniques and tools will be used, including breaking a WPA-protected wireless network, defeating SSL/TLS encryption, and obtaining a reverse shell with system rights on the victim’s computer.

By experiencing these attacks in a simulated penetration test, we can gain a deeper understanding of the theoretical foundations and their implications for real-life scenarios. With this knowledge, the attack vectors can be mitigated to a bare minimum. In many cases, the cybersecurity-aware usage of IT systems is already countering many real threats.

Prof. Dr. Arno Wacker is an assistant professor with the University of Kassel in Germany and the head of the research group Applied Information Security (AIS). Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor at UMBC teaching the network security class. He is also the lead of the open source project CrypTool 2  and a member of the steering group of MysteryTwister C3 . His main research interests are modern security protocols for decentralized distributed systems, computerized cryptanalysis of classical ciphers, and cybersecurity awareness. At the University of Kassel, he teaches classes about cryptology and cybersecurity. Additionally, he regularly offers cryptology workshops for students at local schools and gives talks about penetration testing for companies. Email: <*protected email*>

Host: Alan T. Sherman, *protected email*

The post talk: Practical Introduction to Penetration Testing , 12pm 4/28, ITE227, UMBC appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Come to URCAD on Wednesday, April 26. Rosa Rada will present her research "Information Flows and Food Assistance: Challenges to SNAP Program Provision in Baltimore City".

In an effort to modernize and streamline service programs, governments are increasingly looking for ways to alter program delivery. Since 2015, there were two major changes implemented regarding the provision of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the State of Maryland: the launch of an online platform to automate SNAP enrollment and a new issuance schedule for benefits.

Read more the rest of her abstract here...

In recognition of the other month-long celebration that is April’s National Poetry Month, Women’s Center Special Projects Coordinator Amelia Meman recorded a discussion on writing as a woman with her two best friends. Check out the video below, and join the conversation!

Writing as a woman.

It’s something I think about fairly often, because it brings up issues of worthiness, knowledge-making, developing identities, creating dialogues and rhetorical communities, and communicating experience. Writing is, in many ways, the convergence of the private becoming public–y’know, that old feminist maxim. Writing as an act and later as a product contains multitudes, especially in its intersections with identity.

That said, I was eager to talk with two of my best friends, Susie Hinz and Kerrin Smith, about their experiences as writers, as woman, and as women writers (or alternatively writerly women?). A video of our conversation is below. We talk about the intersections of identity and writing, getting over feelings of unworthiness, working through writer’s block, and many other writing-related things.

Susie is a UMBC alum who is working at Maryland Humanities and is also curating a fantastic blog (and possibly publishing a novel in the future). Kerrin is a poet in the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program, and you can catch updates on her published work (and her life) on her Twitter.

This is how we generally feel about writing. (Thanks to Susie for this picture.)

A note: Our discussion is extremely limited in terms of “what it means to be a woman writer,” and we want to acknowledge this. We all have particular aspects of privilege and oppression that affect our identities (gender, creative, and otherwise), and this conversation stems from a particular place of privilege. It’s my hope that this discussion, though limited in terms of perspective, is still insightful and helpful to those watching.

Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) features research, scholarship, and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates. Student work is shared through oral presentations, posters, artistic exhibits and performances, and film.

Over 250 presenters participate annually. Researchers work with faculty mentors on independent research, or research that is part of the mentor’s on-going projects.  They are from all disciplines, and can be working on a thesis, capstone project, part of a scholars or honors program, or they can be unaffiliated with other programs.

Students who have received Undergraduate Research Awards (URA) for the previous year will be presenting their findings. The UMBC Review, UMBC’s annual peer-reviewed research journal, which features academic papers written by UMBC undergraduates, makes its debut at this event- stop by and get your copy! Come hear the alumni keynote speaker talk about their experiences after UMBC, and how being an undergraduate researcher benefited them.

UMBC is unique in providing this opportunity for undergraduate students to conduct and present their research in a professional and supportive setting.  Students get valuable feedback from their peers, faculty, and staff, and practice their public speaking and presentations skills.  This campus-wide celebration of achievement affirms UMBC’s commitment to the twin goals of research and a distinctive undergraduate experience.

This is Lance.  He predicts that he will win the URCAD selfie contest.

"I've taken thousands of selfies," he noted. "They're having a red carpet and everything. Yeah, this one is in the bag."

Think you can beat Lance?

Upload your original photos to FaceBook and/or Twitter using #URCAD for a chance to win one of four gift cards to the UMBC Bookstore!

Categories:

• Best overall selfie: Take a photo with a UMBC celebrity (President Hrabowski, Provost Rous, Dean Stacey…) or get creative!
• Best with mentor
• Best with family member
• Best with student presentation/poster

The contest starts April 26, 2017 9:00 a.m. Upload photos by 4/28/17 at 6:00 p.m.

To be eligible to win the contest, you must follow the steps outlined below including uploading your original photo to FaceBook and/or Twitter using #URCAD.

The UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
is pleased to present as part of our distinguished lecture series

Human-Like Strategies for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents

Dr. Sergei Nirenburg
Professor of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

11:00am Friday, 28 April 2017, ITE 325b

Artificial intelligent agents functioning in human-agent teams must correctly interpret perceptual input and make appropriate decisions about their actions. These are arguably the two central problems in computational cognitive modeling. The RPI LEIA Lab builds language-endowed intelligent agents that extract meaning of text and dialog and use the results together with input from other perception modes, a long-term belief repository, rich models of the world and of other agents, and a model of the interaction situation to make decisions about actions. Specific phenomena we currently concentrate on include incrementality, treatment of unexpected input and non-literal language (e.g., metaphor), analysis of agent biases and “mindreading,” and deliberate concept learning. All these studies are characterized by our belief in the ultimate utility of building causal models of agent capabilities that are inspired by human strategies in language processing and decision-making that go beyond analogical reasoning. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work in the above areas.

Sergei Nirenburg is Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also serves as Head of the Department of Cognitive Science. He has worked in the areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and natural language processing for over 35 years, leading R&D teams of up to 80. Dr. Nirenburg’s professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in computer models of societies of human and computer agents, continuing development of the theory of ontological semantics, and the acquisition and management of knowledge about the world and about language. Academic R&D teams under Dr. Nirenburg’s leadership have implemented a variety of proof-of-concept and prototype application systems for cognitive modeling, intelligent tutoring and a variety of NLP tasks (machine translation, question answering, text summarization, information extraction, computational field linguistics, knowledge elicitation and learning). Dr. Nirenburg has written two and edited five books and published over 200 scholarly articles in journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

The post talk: Human-Like Strategies for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents, 11am Fri 4/48, UMBC appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.