TGGD #18: Leigh Honeywell, IT Security Expert

TGGD #18: Leigh Honeywell on Disclosure Matters: Learning to Listen to Security Researchers

Leigh Honeywell is a jane of many trades. She works as a Malware Operations Engineer at Symantec while finishing up a degree at the University of Toronto. By night (and sometimes over lunch) she is a co-founder and director of HackLab.TO, Toronto's hacker space. She also serves on the board of advisors of the SECtor security conference, is a Google Summer of Code mentor, as well as an avid cyclist, book nerd, and traveller. (Bio via: Pycon 2010)

Leigh will give us a brief overview of her career thus far, and offer some insights into success, failure and lessons learned. Then she's going to give us a talk relevant to any company or organization which produces software or has a public-facing website. When security researchers discover bugs which impact the confidentiality, availability, or integrity of data, they are faced with a tough challenge: how to get information to the right people, and ensure that things get fixed or mitigated so that users are protected. Drawing on lessons from the free and open source software communities, Leigh will talk about how hackers (the good kind!) wish you'd deal with security vulnerability disclosure.

The formal portion of the program kicks off at 7:00. Folks usually gather between 6:00 and 7:00. Meals/drinks are cash & carry. We charge a $10.00 fee to sign up for the event. This money will be directly allocated to your first drink at dinner. If you sign up to attend, please come. Our events frequently sell out and we have many people on the wait list. If you can't attend, please change your RSVP asap so that it opens the door to others who might want to join us.