NULLCON 9: BLACKSHIELD AWARDS 2018

The Categories

Elite CISO

The CISOs who have achieved excellence in applying security in their organization and in Public Domain. This category involves banks, Telecom, Finance, Travel domain which directly deals with Public resource, individual data and connectivity.

Nominees:

1. Mathan Babu Kasilingam (CISO) National Payment Corp. of India

Manthan is responsible to monitor, evaluate and implement improvements of Risk Management controls and governance areas. He has expertise in building robust Cyber Security defence and response mechanism for financial institutions & Banks.

He has been instrumental over the past 16+ years in delivering Security Architecture, Exhibiting Compliance and conducting Security Audits for multiple leading organization’s in India, Singapore, Malaysia and Middle East.

At NPCI he enshoulders the critical responsibility of shaping and protecting the India’s retail payment processing infrastructure.

2. Shiv Kumar Pandey -(CISO) Bombay Stock Exchange

Shiv spear heads the Security on India’s most complex and high-performance, high-responsive & highly critical IT infrastructure of Bombay Stock Exchange.

BSE Sees Millions of people doing Billions of transaction everyday exchanging securities worth Trillions of rupees. Managing The security of such a complex organizational infrastructure Incredible responsibility very well managed by Shiv.

3. Ashutosh Jain (CISO) AXIS BANK

Ashutosh is CISO with Axis Bank. He provides strategic direction and delivers cyber security, information risk and security governance at Axis Bank.

With Bank of America, where he established the technology audit function for South Asia, and was responsible for bank audits in the South Asia and Far East Region

He has been a consistent technology and information risk specialist for past 19 years, becoming a practical problem solver, lateral thinker, and adaptive communicator.

4. Amar Chakravarty (CISO) SBI General Insurance

Ashutosh is CISO of SBI General Insurance and previously with SBI, India's Largest Bank. He was responsible for leading the process of a new contract through a RFP process. He has also initiated the movement of a major application from a on-premise implementation to a cloud-based SAAS model.

Currently he is exploring a means of supplementing the existing base application with a nimble front-end application to facilitate the company to readily embrace the new digital world of APIs / microservices / IOTs etc. which are expected to disrupt all lines of businesses in the next 3-5 years.

Community Star

The go to person in the community whose contribution, knowledge sharing, administration, communication, proliferation has helped many comrades in the security world.

Nominees:

1. Prashant KV (Staff Security Engg) Kohl's [Winner]

The Gurudev of the Indian Infosec Community, mentor of many and instrumental in the early success of Null Open Security Community. Currently working as a Staff Security Engineer at Kohl's Department Stores, he is a known for his technical prowess and great mentoring skills.

Prashant has kicked off & supported many initiatives like Kid Glove at Cocon and Women In Infosec at various forums.

He is not only an excellent Technical Mentor but an ace Life coach for many InfoSec professionals. He has dedicated most of his time and resources for the service of security community.

2. Dhanesh Kizhakkinan (Security Researcher) Fire Eye

Dhanesh is a Staff Research Scientist at FireEye, Inc. Well known in the InfoSec circles for his achievement such as Windows kernel bugs, IE/Edge memory corruption issues and many more important CVEs(CVE-2016-0071, CVE-2016-3317, CVE-2016-3234...) under his belt that got him in Microsoft top 50 security researchers for 2017.

He is really one of the researchers who has the bar rather high for younger generation. Many look up to him as not only one of the best information security professional but also a great person.

He has contributed wealth of knowledge thorough his technical write-ups and research papers.

3. Prashant Mahajan (Creater of Null Jobs)

Who in the infosec is not aware of NullJobs? It’s the India's biggest and only Job portal dedicated for Info-Sec jobs in India. Prashant has been the man behind the Null Jobs.

Security Consultant at Sense of Security, he also is a core member of Null community and was instrumental in the early success of Null.

Prashant was very active with the Pune Cyber Crime Branch and assisting them on various technical investigation cases. He has 4 years association with them with solving cybercrime cases and sharing his knowledge to train the Cyber Cell Pune department.

He has developed the Web Application Fingerprinting Scanner tool called as "Kunsa" & ADRecon, an Active Directory Recon Tool is his latest contribution to community.

Luminaire

The most talked about person in most of the 1337 conferences and communities, one who has made significant contribution to the security landscape and has been an inspiration to others. His/Her achievements and contribution should be open for public and not proprietary.

Nominees:

1. Edwin van Andel (CEO) Zerocopter

Edwin is an awesome CEO and speaker. He has won awards for his much appreciated and eye-opening talk about what role hackers can play in protecting business and customer information.

He talks about how bug bounties and the Responsible Disclosure processes can work, but also how they sometimes do not. And he tries to open the door to a safer online world!

2. Shubham Mittal (Go-Jek)

Shubham is a great mentor and an amazing speaker. He is an active Information Security researcher with interest in Offensive/Defensive security and Open Source Intelligence.

He has got a good presence in security / hacker conferences and has spoken / trained / presented at Black Hat, DEFCON, NullCon, c0c0n and multiple Null Chapters.

Apart from this, he has been working hard to raise awareness about Reconnaissance (OSINT), an important phase of pen-testing. He is core-organizer of Recon Village and conducted it at DefCon 25 and c0c0n 2017.

3. Asfhaq Ansari (Founder) HackSys Team

Ashfaq Ansari is the founder of HackSys Team code named "Panthera". He is a Security Researcher with experience in various aspects of Information Security.

He has authored "HackSys Extreme Vulnerable Driver" and "Shellcode of Death". He has also written and published various whitepapers on low level software exploitation.

His core interest lies in "Low Level Exploitation", "Reverse Engineering", "Program Analysis" and "Hybrid Fuzzing". He is a fanboy of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He is the chapter lead for null (Pune) and has many CVEs under his belt.

Best of the Show

This award is for our Exhibition / Prototype participants, organizations making remarkable innovations in the field of security and also demonstrating the sense of social responsibility.

Will be decided at the Venue

Best Null Chapter

null - Bangalore Has been the best chapter for last 2 successive years. It will be interesting to see if some other chapter wins this prestigious award this year. Winners are chosen based on the agenda, number of members retained, extended and quality contributions.

Decided based on Around the year performance

The Process

BlackShield Awards is a 3 step Process

Nominations

We invite nomination for all the categories from all over the world. From the received nomination Award Juries select 4 finalists strictly based on the credibility, contribution and Impact created by the Nominees.

Juries do extensive background research to choose the finalists.

Voting

We declare the top 4 finalists in each categories and ask every one to vote for the finalists.

The Award Ceremony

The Finalists & the winners are invited to NullCon and the awards are presented on the BlasckShield Awards Night.

Important Dates

• 09-01-2018: The voting process Starts
• 09-02-2018: The voting process Closes
• 03-03-2018: "Best of the Show" Award at Closing Ceremony