As part of the OWASP EU Tour 2013, there will be a special event in London next month, along the lines of the recent ones in Cambridge and Leicester.

The one day conference is being held in central London on Monday 3rd of June 2013 at the Lion Court Conference Centre, 25 Procter Street, Holborn, London, WC1V 6NY. The nearest tube station is Holborn. It is free to attend and is open to all, but registration is required as numbers are limited to 100.

The agenda is still being finalised, but OWASP Ireland chapter leader Fabio Cerullo is presenting PCIDSS for developers, OWASP Cambridge chapter leader Steven van der Baan will be talking about simple steps for secure coding, and OWASP London chapter leader Justin Clarke will be speaking about securing development with PMD, the popular Java code scanning tool. I will be introducing and demonstrating OWASP Cornucopia. A very developer-orientated agenda so far.

The EU Tour continues to OWASP chapters in Barcelona, Bucharest, Belgium, Denmark, Dublin, Lisbon, Netherlands and Rome. Other locations will be added in due course.

Cornucopia Ecommerce Website Edition v1.00 was uploaded to the OWASP website in February and has now been upgraded to a full OWASP project.

Today, I have completed the new OWASP Cornucopia Project pages which include:

• Description and objectives
• Presentation given at OWASP Netherlands in March
• Links to all the references files, including a new security coding practice requirement identities, created last week
• Instructions on how to play
• Frequently asked questions
• Acknowledgements
• Road map and how to get involved
• Link to the PCISSC information supplement for PCIDSS referencing Cornucopia

Please let me know if you think I can add anything of use to the project pages.

I am also working on some minor updates to the ecommerce website edition's documentation and deck. I will be presenting the project at an event in London shortly.

OFCOM, the UK communications sector's regulator and competition authority, has announced a report on adults' use of media and attitudes.

The Adults' Media Use and Attitudes Report 2013 (complete 181 page print version) discusses media literacy, take-up, preference and media use, understanding, attitudes and concerns, use of the internet and mobile phones, and users in three class — new, "narrow" and non-users.

There is a wealth of valuable data for strategic planning and marketing purposes, but also useful information on security and safety habits and attitudes to regulation of the internet. If you need information to help support decisions around security and usability, this report will have something of use to you.

It is this weekend's best read.

Last week the UK's Department for Business Innovation & Skills published the 2013 Information Security Breaches Survey, created in conjunction with PwC.

The report presents the results of the survey and breaks the findings down for larger (>250 staff), medium and smaller (<50 staff) organisations. The term "cyber" appears 15 times and "APT" only once, so is generally hyperbole-free.

The most interesting data points for me are:

• 18% of "worst breaches" related to websites and internet gateways, and 4% to breach of laws/regulations
• For all breaches, operation disruption typically lasts a week, with 2-4weeks FTE effort responding to the incident, and a quarter of incidents leading to lost business
• Reputation losses were estimated to be between £10,000 and £100,000.

The report is available to download in full free of charge without registration.

I have just had time to catch up on my attendance and participation at Security B-Sides London 2013.

This community-led event was held at the town hall of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on Wednesday 24th April, and was supported by a large number of speakers, educators, volunteers and sponsors. It was an extremely well organised, and useful, day.

Following the very well attended welcome and introduction from the B-Sides London crew, I went to an immensely valuable and engaging presentation by David Rook (aka Security Ninja) on how he introduced and developed an application security programme at his employer Realex Payments. He has got to the point where customers are approaching his company to act as a payment services provider due only to their knowledge of Security Ninja, and so the marketing department kindly designed cartoon-style presentation slides (like the one illustrated above). They also had these printed as booklets to hand-out to those attending the talk at B-Sides London. David described what was done, how it was achieved, and things he would approach differently in hindsight. I won't spoil the plot for you as you will be able to read the booklet yourselves (keep an eye open for a blog post (now available).

After this, I went down to the new Rookie Track where new presenters had been given support through mentoring to give 15-minute presentations. Firstly I listened to Artjom Vassiljev describe how he has built software security testing checks into a continuous integration process with Jenkins.

Following a quick coffee break and catch up with some friends & acquaintances, I returned to the Rookie Track and listened to Diarmaid McManus describe a new Eclipse plugin called ESP he has been working on to help integrate code review checks into developer's coding tools.

Ksenia Dmitrieva provided an introduction to HTML5 risks and gave explanations and examples of common attacks. She also explained the preventative measures which should be used to protect against these issues.

Post lunch, I tracked down Dinis Cruz and we set up our workshop on using OWASP O2 to visualise OWASP AppSensor behaviour. I introduced the concept of application-specific attack detection and response, and described how the ideas might be retrofitted relatively simply to an existing web application such as the bulletin board software phpBB. A review of phpBB's inherent capabilities and logging provide a useful hook for detection points, and responses can include adding users to phpBB's list of "banned IPs" and blocking IPs at the operating system level. Dinis continued with a live demo of the AppSensor demo application, created by Michael Coates, and then he went on to show how AppSensor's new web services Java code can be called directly from within a .Net application TeamMentor.It was good to bounce ideas off the workshop participants and get their thoughts and suggestions on the practicalities of implementing AppSensor-like capabilities.

Finally I saw Gavin Holt talking about "NoSQL & Big Data - A Way to Lose Even More Stuff" in which he described the common weaknesses in using NoSQL and attacks that attempt to access such systems and their data. I really liked the 15minute format on the Rookie Track and all three speakers I heard were really good.

Overall, an excellent day. Many thanks to the very professional B-Sides London team in particular for making sure it all happened.

Update 30th April 2013: Link to Security Ninja's slides added. Ksenia Dmitrieva's talk added.

The Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report has been published drawing on data from 19 organisations including the European CyberCrime Center.

The report includes information on 621 confirmed data breaches, the majority of which were financially motivated crime, followed by state-affiliated espionage. Although 93% of the breaches were attributable to outsiders, a significant proportion (14%) were attributable to insiders alone or insiders working with external agents. Attempts to intentionally access or harm information assets without authorisation by circumventing or thwarting logical security mechanisms (labelled "hacking" in the report" accounted for 52% of incidents. Of these, 22% related to the use of web applications.

The report can be downloaded free of charge without registration.

Next week Dinis Cruz and I will be running an AppSensor workshop at Security B-Sides London 2013.

We will be demonstrating and helping attendees of the workshop specify, define and implement application-specific attack detection and real-time response. Our agenda is:

• OWASP AppSensor concept
• Attack detection exercise
• Real world implementation
• Alternative deployment models

We'll be using paper-based materials and real code demonstrations (in .Net, Java and PHP), so just bring your brains along. The workshop is being run from 14:00 to 15:30 hrs on Wednesday April 24th 2013 and can be booked on arrival at the event. It is available on a first come, first served basis. Security B-Sides London is a community-driven free event but requires registration, but due to overwhelming demand there is a waiting list.

We hope to see you there.

Three regional OWASP application security conferences are planned for later this year.

OWASP runs the most comprehensive application security conferences with a very high standard of training courses, speakers and delegates to network with. The next three conferences are:

• August 20-23: AppSec EU Research 2013, Hamburg, Germany
• October 1-4: AppSec Latam 2013, Lima, Peru
• November 18-21: AppSec USA 2013, New York, USA

The calls for training and papers are open for AppSec EU and AppSec USA. I hope to attend both of these. AppSec Asia will occur again in spring 2014.

McAfee Labs has announced finding about malware that targets payment terminals.

The malware called vSkimmer can detect the card readers,steal information from the Windows machines attached to these readers, and send the data to a control server. It builds upon the previously found Dexter malware.

There's a nice summary on the PCI Guru blog as to why retailers should already have defences in place to prevent the attack and exploitation.

There was a high attendance at OWASP NL's chapter meeting at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.

Jim Manico was unable to present due to illness but Georgia Weidman, who was speaking at Blackhat Europe 2013, stepped in to present the Smartphone Pentesting Framework (SPF). SPF is the result of a DARPA Cyber Fast Track project, and provides tools and a methodology for penetration testers and security teams to gather information, assess and exploit smart phone devices in the workplace.

We were well looked after at the event. The attendees asked very relevant questions, and I hope my animated presentation showing how to play the Cornucopia card game explained the rules adequately. Thanks to Martin for driving us from Amsterdam to Nijmegen and back.

The presentations are available on the OWASP website.