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August 10, 2019: DEFCON27 - SEVillage, Las Vegas, NV
Hacking Your Career Through Social Engineering
Social engineering is a special form of hacking that bridges our technical skills with a deep understanding of human behavior. Many of us use this special blend of techniques to assist in our various colors of hacking but even those of us not in a professional social engineering, hacking, or penetration testing role can use these skills to aid in our career success. Social engineering has a wonderful set of techniques that can be used to help you enter into a new job, a new career, get a promotion, self promote, overcome imposter syndrome, plus many other situations. This talk will walk through the ways we can apply our knowledge of social engineering to any job and any career to help us be successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvdB0BlTeJY&feature=youtu.be
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August 7, 2019: WA ACTE Summer Conference, Spokane, WA
Community Partner: Future Ada
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/community-partner-future-ada
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March 23, 2019: SQL Saturday Spokane 2019, Spokane, WA
Antipattern Assumptions in Data
While we are engineers, we are still people full of assumptions, biases and unchecked preconceptions about society and other people. This impacts our design patterns for software and databases. When we design architecture that is limited based on our assumptions, we can find our products limiting and creating user experience problems. In this session, we will discuss common antipattern assumptions that cause these limitations in our architecture design. We will also talk through the importance of creating a diverse team to help broaden perspectives and increase innovation which can help counter these antipatterns to pave the way for higher quality products.
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/antipattern-assumptions-in-data
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March 9, 2019: GirlConNW, Spokane, WA
The Power of Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Being Brave
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/the-power-of-authenticity-vulnerability-and-being-brave
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October 8, 2018: Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2018, Portland, OR
Diverse Teams Are Essential to Quality Software
It has been shown that having diverse teams lead to increased problem-solving abilities. Solving complex problems is pivotal to software engineering and producing high-quality software. It’s natural to conclude that creating diverse software teams is a key element on the road to software quality. Rather than only thinking of quality in terms of testing by quality assurance engineers, I would challenge you to consider the broader aspects of the other factors that play into creating quality software. Team composition is critical to software quality output.
This paper will discuss ways you can create a diverse software team and highlight examples of what Future Ada, a Spokane based non-profit, is doing to help build a strong diverse workforce.
https://www.pnsqc.org/diverse-teams-are-essential-for-quality-software/
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/diverse-teams-are-essential-for-quality-software
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September 15, 2018: Seattle Code Camp 2018, Seattle, WA
The Human Element of DevOps
DevOps is the collaboration of development and operations working toward a common goal of delivering software in high efficiency. We often think of the tools and processes involved in this partnership when DevOps comes up -- scripting, automation, CI/CD, etc. In addition to the technological aspect of DevOps, there is a huge human element that needs to stay in focus. I'll cover the different parts of the people side of DevOps including culture, diversity, psychology, and why the technology side is so important.
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/the-human-element-of-devops/edit
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August 10, 2018: The Diana Initiative 2018, Las Vegas, NV
CYA Sexual Harassment
As women in infosec, we run a higher risk of getting stuck dealing with a sexual harassment or discrimination situation. Often by the time we realize what's happening it's too late or we are too surprised/exhausted/distraught to think clearly to know how to manage the situation properly. Given we can't always count on HR or our manager to support us or put our needs first, we need to know how to advocate for ourselves and what to do before the problem happens. I'm going to talk about what I've learned from my own experiences to help you be better prepared if it happens to you or someone you know.
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June 23, 2018: Beer City Code 2018, Grand Rapids, MI
Building Inclusive Tech
Want to make your team smarter, faster, stronger? Turning your team into one that is diverse and inclusive can accomplish this! How can we do that? How do you optimize for maximum team diversity? I’ll walk you through industry recommendations to help get you there.
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November 28, 2017: Gonzaga University Women in Computer Science Group, Spokane, WA
Women in Tech: Career Prep and Networking Tips
Spokane to the Women in Computer Science student group at Gonzaga University on prepping for entering industry.
https://speakerdeck.com/amaya30/women-in-tech-career-prep-and-networking-tips
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October 17, 2016: Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2016, Portland, OR
Building Stakeholder Confidence Through an Automated Testing Solution
How do you build stakeholder confidence in your software and also help minimize time spent on manual User Acceptance Testing (UAT) efforts? By getting stakeholders involved in the development of an automated testing suite, you build a foundation of understanding in both what is being tested and how the software is being tested. This in turn also allows the stakeholders to be more familiar with the implementation of the software. Involving stakeholders builds confidence in the software, the test coverage of features and gives them a clearer understanding of why less manual tests during UAT are required.
Building a system to meet this need requires good architecting to allow for stakeholder involvement, easy scalability, portability, and minimal maintenance. At Spokane Teachers Credit Union (STCU), we designed an automation test system called Browser Bot that uses SpecFlow to allow business owners to write the tests, Selenium for driving the browser, a custom library to dynamically pull test data based on test criteria, and TeamCity to run the tests on a Selenium Grid. The partnership between the software department and stakeholders to create this system has already begun to build the desired understanding and confidence in our systems from stakeholders. Using my team at STCU as an example, I will identify some of the common problems, solutions we used and the results we achieved. By following a similar approach, you can also get positive stakeholder participation while meeting the testing needs of your software team.
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June 14, 2010: IWia2010, Morioka, Japan
Usable Security Policies + User Training: The Best Method to Counter Social Engineering Attacks
Security is a foremost concern for any institution. Investing in the best technological and physical security products only go so far to protect a system and often forget to take the users into account. A social engineer can fairly easily manipulate a system user into granting him or her access despite all the security measures taken. The best method to counter a social engineering attack is to implement usable security policies so users know what to do, and to give all users proper training so they know why they need to follow the policies