How do I prevent my web app being hacked?

For November we have Luke Briner of Pixel Pin to talk about most developers least favourite subject "security".

Another week and another high-profile company gets hacked as well as hundreds of smaller organisations that we will never hear about. The cause? Clearly sometimes it is sheer incompetence but as we look at some of the larger companies, they seem to be doing mostly the right thing but are still having customer data stolen and demonstrate a lack of security management despite the history of industry attacks and the amount of security management that exists today.

This talk aims to look at the approaches that most people seem to take towards data security, using web application passwords as a fairly common and familiar example. We will look at why the current approaches are not always enough, as good as they are in their own right, and also where it is easy to be drawn to arguments that are not really very useful.

We will finish with the various sorts of side-channel attacks and the ways in which you can succeed at security alongside common failures and weaknesses, both in Development, but also in organisations generally.

Although the talk will be reasonably technical, you do not need any specific security expertise to understand the material and even non-technical people should understand enough to follow the talk.

Luke Briner is CTO of PixelPin, an award-winning visual login system that is 80% security and 20% User Experience! He spends his days looking at emerging threats and the latest security horror stories working out whether the system is designed to cope with these threats as well as coding the next piece of functionality. His background is in financial and security software (mostly .Net) but he has been involved with writing such widely different software as Mobile Apps, manufacturing software, PLCs, PHP web services and even Turbo Pascal back in the day. Talk to him about trains or air crash investigations and he’ll go on for hours!

As usual we're at the lovely Deepspaceworks so a £3 contribution is greatly appreciated.