Friday, September 8, and Saturday, September 9
St. Ambrose University's Rogalski Center, 518 West Locust Street, Davenport IA
Founded in 2015 by the Quad Cities Cybersecurity Alliance, the third-annual CornCon – an event designed to raise community awareness and provide business solutions for dealing with cybersecurity threats – will feature a September 8 workshop for business leaders and IT professionals, and a September 9 general conference boasting guest speakers, hands-on workshops, contests, and a vendor expo.
More than three dozen experts in the cybersecurity field will be on hand to lead workshops and deliver presentations, with the visiting guests including Dan Stein, Acting Branch Chief for the Cybersecurity Education & Awareness branch of the Department of Homeland Security; Danielle Kingsbury, president and dounder of CyberSecPsych; and John Bumgarner, a former U.S. Marine and U.S. Army Special Operations soldier. Local community groups and businesses, meanwhile, will join the likes of John Deere and Facebook to show off STEM-related projects and discuss cybersecurity careers.
One particular session gives credence to the event's pun heavy title. Found at the website: "How I would Have Done It: Practical Election Hacking: For much of the past year we have been talking about election-related hacking and the various alleged attempts by Russian-affiliated groups to influence the 2016 Presidential election and the 2017 French Presidential Election. The reality is, those attempts largely didn't influence many votes. This talk will focus on methods of how a successful influential operation and election "hacking" campaign would operate and how the outcome could be affected by foreign (or covert domestic) parties.
Nation State Disruption and Influence with Info Ops:Prior to the birth of the internet foreign intelligence services manipulated another country's political process by handing our flyers, hanging posters, writing articles in local papers, and occasionally killing a candidate. The majority of these tactics only reached a limited subset of a given population. Today foreign intelligence services can use the internet to reach a larger and more diverse section of a country's population. The speed of the internet provides rapid dissemination of information to influence someone opinion, spark discourse or create physical chaos. In some extreme cases foreign intelligence services coupled with military forces have taken over sections of other country after sowing the seeds of disinformation in the region."
Saturday's conference also offers children an opportunity to learn about cybersecurity in the kids’ hacker camp “The Childen of the Corn,” with STEM-related activities involving lockpicking, coding, electronics, cryptography, and the ethical use of technology.
For more information on, and to register for, CornCon III: The Courne Ultimatium and its correlating events, visit CornCon.net.
