One month to SnykCon 2021: Sessions to attend, flags to capture, Simons to Maple

We’re less than a month away from SnykCon 2021 — Snyk’s annual developer conference that helps you learn how to build applications securely running October 5–7 — and I personally can’t wait to attend! We have a packed agenda full of expert talks, hands-on workshops, helpful demos, product roadmaps, opportunities to interact with some of the smartest speakers and leaders of developer security in the industry!

A few weeks back, we previewed a handful of the 100+ sessions at this year’s SnykCon. In this post, I want to highlight a few that I’m excited about, as well as other events taking place during the three days.

Something to talk about

Jenny Radcliffe (Social Engineer and People Hacker) will be giving a talk about The Human Element of Security: How to Be a People Hacker. Jenny has made a career out of IRL penetration testing — breaking into physical premises to show the flaws in security systems — and the stories she tells sound like they’re straight from the movie. Bring your whole family to this session and maybe make some popcorn.

Suzie Prince (Head of Product, DevOps at Atlassian) and Gareth Rushgrove (VP of Products at Snyk) will be talking about why Developers Don’t Want Someone Looking Over Their Shoulder. And if you’re a developer, this isn’t news to you. In this talk, Suzie and Gareth will discuss the importance of autonomy for developers and what tools to give them to autonomously deal with vulnerabilities that require security expertise.

In Who Is Your Parser And What Does He Do: URL Parsing Gone Wrong, Noam Moshe (Security Researcher at Claroty) will explore the consistent inconsistency of URL parsers across different platforms and languages. He’ll dive into exploitation techniques that use URL parsing inconsistencies, as well as some vulnerabilities discovered in popular open source projects.

Cristina Buenahora Bustamante (Founding Engineer at Cortex) will be advocating for collaboration in the talk Evangelizing the SRE mindset: Building a culture of reliability and ownership. You’ll leave this session with practical tips on how to help engineers see SREs and security as partners, not hurdles.

If you’re new to Snyk (or just looking for pointers), I highly recommend attending the Getting Started with Snyk workshop being run by Waleed Arshad (Community Manager at Snyk). In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to integrate Snyk into your SDLC to identify and remediate vulnerabilities across your codebase and infrastructure.

Partner Day & Fetch the Flag

On October 5, we’re offering two different ways to participate in SnykCon. If you’re a Snyk partner (technology alliance, channel, or GSI), join us for Partner Day. You’ll learn about our vision and roadmap, have access to AMA sessions with Snyk executives, participate in a hacking session, and more.

For everyone else, we’re having our first ever Fetch the Flag (with Patch as master of ceremonies)! Participants will be able to show off (and level up) their security skills over 20 penetration testing challenges. You’ll be able to compete against thousands of players to win prizes, including Nintendo Switches and Fetch the Flag branded swag. Register for Fetch the Flag today.

There’s more to life than just secure development

Since a conference can't be all work all the time, we'll also be featuring entertainment for attendees (and anyone else who wants to pull up a chair). Prepare to have your mind blown and walk away wondering how on earth that could have been possible.

And back by popular demand, SnykCon will be emceed by the inimitable Simon Maple. He’ll be providing hot takes and session previews all event long. If you didn’t get enough of him last year, just wait.

This brings me to... Register today to attend in October!

There’s too much going on to cover it all in a blog, so take a look at the full SnykCon agenda for yourself to learn about all the great talks. And if there are any sessions you’re particularly excited about, let us know on Twitter (@snyksec).

We can’t wait to see you (virtually) at SnykCon.

• Where is it? Virtual

• When is it? October 5–7, 2021

• How much does it cost? Free!

• How do I register? snyk.io/snykcon/

• Where’s the full agenda? snyk.io/snykcon/agenda/

• Who will be speaking? snyk.io/snykcon/speakers/