A little while ago, I was thoroughly sick of the usual attack attack attack gumpf, and decided to put up a competition for Top 10 defenses.
Epic fail.
Looking back at it, attacking the attackers is not a winning strategy. It’s a fact of human nature that it’s better to be a hot firefighter putting out a fire that costs a million bucks to put right than to be the materials engineer who designs cheap fireproof cladding. I’m burying the hatchet as I burnt a fair bit of goodwill in my original announcement, which not my intention at all. We still need folks to break stuff and disprove snake oil, so there’s a place for the dark side whether I agree with the focus on the dark side or not.
Just two nominations made Andrew sad despite the worthiness of the submissions.
- Rob Lewis nominated Trustifier http://trustifier.com/ryu/features.html
- I nominated Josh Zlatin, a colleague for the work he has done on PureWAF, extensions for the OWASP Core Rule Set + Mod Security. You can see the results of PureWAF on Pure Hacking’s website, which is behind our WAF in the cloud service. That’s not an invitation to attack us, just sayin’
Please discuss or vote in the comments section for who you think should get the non-existant gong.
The Sorta Inaugural 2011 Pure Hacking Top Web App Sec Defenses Competition
There’s a couple of changes. Pure Hacking will be sponsoring the competition in 2011. There will be categories, such as Life Time Achievement, Best Security Architecture, Best Left Field Idea, Best Secure Business Idea, Best Quick and Dirty Defense, Best Educator, and of course Best Defense. I will detail more about the categories as time goes on. I will be getting inappropriate statuettes made with engraving and everything. If you feel like you can donate something to boost the booty, contact me.
As for nominations, I will keep a running tally of awesomeness from my RSS feeds and other sources. You can nominate your favorite folks and defenses by e-mailing me – vanderaj ( at ) owasp.org. Come December 1, 2011, I’ll put them up for voting at which time I will disclose the prizes.
So far –
1. OWASP’s XSS roundtable at the OWASP Summit in Portugal is a worthy nominee. Let’s stamp out XSS.
2. I think Gunnar Peterson should get a Lifetime Prize just for being Gunnar. If more of us thought like Gunnar, the world would be a safer place and folks would be making a LOT more money than they do today.
Please keep this competition in mind throughout 2011.
Leave a Reply