Yesterday was the first meeting under the newly founded “OWASP Bay Area” chapter, which combines the San Francisco, San Jose, and East Bay chapters into one big one! The meeting was held at the beautiful Stanford Alumni Association Center.

Niels Provos presented on how Google detects malware from their web crawlers, and the ties to the safe browsing plugin. Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo! was also present, and he asked some good questions. He seemed very interested on if Google was doing this program for the greater good of the web, or if there was a business case for it.

The second talk was from a Stanford Ph.D. student. He gave some neat examples on how attackers can gain information from users. Some techniques he went over was iframes, mixed content behavior, cross site request forgery, and DNS rebinding.

Both talks were excellent, and the crowd turnout was great. Another nice thing was the open bar :)

The next OWASP meeting will be in San Francisco; location to be determined soon. I took a few other pictures at this event, which can be viewed at flickr.