In just one week, Black Hat USA 2013 will be convening at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In this series, intended to preview many of the talks and presentations scheduled for the event, SiliconANGLE will focus on the exploitative vulnerabilities associated with big data and how those vulnerabilities can be limited.

Today, we will delve into a presentation being offered by two engineers with the e-commerce website, Etsy.com, Kyle Barry and Mike Arpaia. Barry joined Etsy in 2011 and is a senior software engineer on the security team. Specifically, he focuses on security engineering and fraud prevention. Arpaia, also a member of the security team, has worked previously with other organizations specializing in mobile application, web application and mobile operating system security. He is also the co-founder of the Stevens Cyber Defense Team at the Stevens Institute of Technology where he is still an advisor.

Reviewing the submitted abstract for their presentation, Barry and Arpaia will be discussing how the security posture of a given application is directly proportional to the amount of information known about that application. Of course it is well known, from a data science perspective, the use of analytics presents significant advantages for an organization. What is less understood and less documented is how an organization can utilize analytics to their advantage in the area of web application security. One of the main purposes of this session will be to instruct web application security practitioners on how best to find opportunity in big data stacks to improve the security posture of applications and create effective defenses for those applications.

Additionally, the two presenters will highlight particular challenges that are able to and should be solved by utilizing big data. On the other hand, they will also discuss existing classes of security mechanisms which cannot feasibly be addressed through the use of big data.

Barry and Arpaia will finish the session by exploring specific examples of how one particular security team uses big data every day to solve hard, interesting problems while also creating an experience that is safer for its users.

Arpaia and Barry will offer their presentation during the 10:15am session on Thursday, August 1.