Internet Security Training Workshop--VT

I'm signed up and attending the Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling next week at Virginia Tech (http://www.conted.vt.edu/isect/). Should be fun.

Ed Skoudis, a SANS handler, will be the instructor. I'm looking forward to it. I have been gearing up for it for a couple weeks now. I have a new firewall, tools, VMWare (with a Fedora 4 VM), and a dual-boot (XP and Fedora 4) set up on the laptop. I'll be making a restore image of the system to an external drive so I should be able to take whatever is thrown at me.

I'll post an after-action report. Should be fun.

[EDIT]
Oh, yeah, if any of y'all are in the Blacksburg, VA area, PM me and we might be able to meet for a brew.
[/EDIT]

Oh, do enjoy yourself! I am taking the same class in the near future.

I'm pretty excited. I finished the restore image last night and have a nice, fresh, clean XP Pro SP2 VM all done. Upgraded the laptop to 1GB RAM and should be able to run the Fedora and XP VMs simultaneously. I'm just all jacked up for this.

Good luck rapier, and I hope you have a good time - let us know how it goes, it sounds interesting. ;)

And you just upgraded to 1GB RAM, did you say? Well, you've also just got 1024 posts.. :D

Cheers,

-jk

Sunday, March 5, 8-something PM, Blacksburg, VA.

Got checked into the motel about 5:45 pm EST. Drove down the the Virginia Tech campus. Huge.
Registered for the workshop. Picked up a CD and SIX texts (wirebound, one an inch thick, the rest between 1/4 inch and 3/4 inch).

Quick scan while having something to eat (darn' near forgot to eat today). Looks like loads of fun.

OK, I've been back a week, recovered from the jet lag and now have a couple minutes to give a brief account of the training. It was great. Ed Skoudis has a tremendous amount of energy. I don't know how he does it. I ran workshops in the past, where I presented almost 8 hours a day for several days and I know what it takes out of you.

Anyway, we worked through five of the books Monday through Friday. They were basically copies of the presentation, with lots of notes. Lots of great material, though. We played with the concepts using our VM OSs as Ed presented them.

Saturday, the last day, we had the "capture the flag" hacking contest. I only got two flags. My team-mates were having problems with their VMs, so I was the only one with a working attack OS. It was educational, but I'm not going to give out any secrets. Sorry.

This week, I'm actually taking some of the things I learned in the course and putting them into practice as we test a web application firewall we have on evaluation.

BTW, I bought Ed's Counter Hack Reloaded. Most of the course materials came from that book, but there is a lot more information there, too. It is on my desk, open and getting highlights and page tags already.

Also, the 504 course was hosted at VT. This was a SANS EDU course, so the cost to higher ed staff, law enforcement and state and federal government was significantly discounted. Couldn't have afforded to take the course otherwise. With the cost of travel and the course, the price was still under the cost of taking the course locally at the regular price.