OWASP Phoenix Chapter September Meeting

Presenter: Kevin Tackett

Presentation: Raiders of the Lost Architecture: Security Testing in Modern Applications

In this talk, Kevin Tackett takes attendees on an expedition through the tangled ruins of modern application architecture. Drawing from real-world penetration testing engagements, he will share stories of uncovering forgotten API endpoints still connected to production data, third-party integrations that outlived their original purpose but retained their access, and AI components bolted onto legacy systems with little consideration for the attack surface they introduced. Like any good archaeologist, a security tester must piece together fragments of understanding while avoiding the traps left behind by those who built before them.

Presenter Bio: Kevin Tackett (fka Kevin Johnson) is CEO of Secure Ideas, a consulting company dedicated to security testing and training. Kevin passionately advocates for cybersecurity through his work with Secure Ideas and as a faculty member at IANS. During his over 30 years in the industry, Kevin acted as an instructor and author for the SANS institute. He also contributed to a number of open-source projects, including OWASP SamuraiWTF (a web pen-testing training environment), Laudanum (a collection of injectable web payloads) and Yokoso (an infrastructure fingerprinting project) and was the founder and lead of the BASE project for Snort. Kevin has served as an expert witness in court cases involving cybersecurity.