As a security engineer at GitLab in the Incident Response team, Valentine’s work mostly consists of putting out cyber fires, threat hunting, and build graphical representations that help visualize our ninety-nine problems. With experience in both red and blue teaming, she likes to think that purple is her color. She is also the founder of WICCA, the Netherlands-based women in cybersecurity educational foundation. Besides computers, Val is a fiction writer who likes Star Wars, heavy metal, and useless things like stickers and D&D.

Why Security Professionals Should Write Code

Why should security professionals write code? To understand the other side.

Pointing out mistakes made by software developers can be fun and highly satisfying. But do we realise how hard it is to actually write complete secure code? This presentation is to challenge the hacker mindset to think about secure coding and the many difficulties that arise when building secure software. There will be examples of bad code, good code, and better code, along with a quick challenge for the audience to write their own secure Ping.

Let’s take a look over the fence so we can become better pentesters, blue teamers, and security professionals in general.