Brisbane

Brisbane

Presenters and Presentations
We are forever looking for volunteers to present at the chapter meetings, so if you've seen something interesting or you have something to say, please let us know.

Often, when we approach potential presenters, we tend to get the following response – “I don’t think my topic is interesting enough”. We just want to stress that as long as the topic is security related – we’re all ears! We’re just a bunch of nice people wanting to learn/share our knowledge of the security domain. So if you would like to present or know of someone that does, please contact us.

Presentations must be vendor agnostic (no selling of products or services), and please review the Speaker Agreement linked above.

Chapter Meetings
Next Brisbane Chapter Meeting - Tuesday February 4, 2014

In February's meeting, David Jorm will present on the topic "Amateur Satellite Intelligence: Watching North Korea".

North Korea is one of the most secretive, and fascinating, places on Earth. Details about the country emerge fleetingly: through the testimony of refugees, from unconfirmed South Korean sources, and from the largely dubious reports of the regime's official mouthpiece, the KCNA. To fill the information vacuum, a vibrant online community of North Korea watchers has emerged. This community makes innovative use of publicly available remote sensing data and other sources of information to fill in the many blanks left by the official accounts.

This talk will outline various investigations undertaken by the North Korea watcher community, and the technologies and techniques it employs. Commercially-available satellite imagery has been used to pre-empt rocket launches well ahead of corporate media, track development and new construction, as well as to map out prison camps such as Yodok in conjunction with the accounts of refugees. More recently, the community has produced an atlas that defines the various sub-national jurisdictions of the country in the absence of officially defined GIS data. Interceptions of North Korean television are analyzed for political and economic developments, as are the first-hand accounts and photo galleries of western tourists. The North's satellite launch in December 2012 has been closely watched by the community, with many members tracking the satellite's trajectory and attempting to receive and decode its transmissions. Even the North's computing systems have been analyzed, for example via leaked copies of the Red Star OS Linux distribution. Screenshots from official government presentations confirm that this OS is indeed used across the country (that's right, pariah states use KDE!). Finally, this talk will cover my own research into using remote sensing to track North Korean food production, and thereby verify (or refute) the official figures that are periodically released by the regime.

Venue: Red Hat Offices, Level 1, 193 North Quay, Brisbane.

Time: 5:30pm for a 6pm start. Lifts to Level 1 will be locked after 6pm. Please arrive before then!

Date: Tuesday 4th February

Close: Session is expected to be completed by 7:00pm.

RSVP: There are limited seats. Please RSVP at http://owasp-brisbane.eventbrite.com

There will be a social gathering at a local hostelry afterwards. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Brisbane OWASP Chapter Leaders
The chapter leaders are [mailto:anne.luk@owasp.org Anne Luk], [mailto:wade@bindshell.net Wade Alcorn], [mailto:glyng@owasp.org Glyn Geoghegan] and [mailto:djorm@redhat.com David Jorm]