In my last post (Up to this Point), I looked at the events leading up to this week, including basic logistics, ticket sales, and how to arrange last-minute airfare and hotel reservations. In this post, I want to touch on some general advice as well as ways of keeping up-to-date during the conference.

This will be my third year at ShmooCon. Since I now feel somewhat like a veteran attendee, I wanted to pass on a bit of advice for anyone attending the conference. The first time I attended ShmooCon, I over-scheduled myself by focusing too much on the scheduled talks. Overall, I probably attended about 20 talks. At the end each day, I was exhausted and just headed home to recover. What I hadn’t realized was that I only took part in about 40% of what the conference had to offer.

I missed out on taking part in all of the challenges, workshops, and events. My biggest regret was missing out on just having a good time with the rest of the attendees. For this reason, I’d recommend taking a good hard look at the scheduled talks today and only choosing five to attend. The rest of the time just relax, take in the environment, and just have fun and enjoy yourself.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that conferences are a great time to come out of our introverted shells (I count myself in this group). We all have something in common—a great interest in security. Because of this, starting a conversation shouldn’t be much of a problem. Just walk up to someone standing in the corner and introduce yourself and ask where they’re from. And if you have any favorite podcasters, tweeters, or bloggers, seek them out and introduce yourself.

While  I wouldn’t consider myself an infosec personality, it’d make my day if someone came up to me and said they enjoyed my tweets or blog posts.

Ok, now that all the soft skill stuff is out of the way, another important thing to consider is the protection of your electronic goods. You need to be very careful of how your devices will interact with anything at the conference. With that in mind, my first recommendation is not to take a laptop with any valuable information to the conference. If you do decide to take one, make sure to disable all wireless capabilities (e.g., BlueTooth and WiFi) and be sure not to plug in any network cables or USB devices. Better yet, spend $50 on a new hard drive and feel free to go au natural. Just be sure to DBAN the drive before using it anywhere else. This is probably the method I’m going to use.

And if you go with the hard drive switch recommendation, please be sure not to visit web sites of any value (e.g., you bank). Phones and PDAs add another challenge when attending hacker conferences. Since a “hard drive switcheroo” type option doesn’t work for most devices, I recommend disabling BlueTooth and WiFi. If you absolutely need access to the Internet, stick with cellular broadband networks for both your laptop and smart phone.

I will now get off my soapbox and pass along some ways to keep up with what’s going on at the conference.

How should you decide which talks and events to attend? Well, you can start by checking out ShmooCon’s Schedule and Events pages. And if you’re on the run, try feeding the entire agenda into your phone or PDA via XML, iCAL, or HTML through the Google Calendar Mark Bristow setup.

While the ShmooCon organizers have planned a very detailed schedule, a lot of the most notable events are simply going to pop up. Like Twitter, ShmooCon has also come to the rescue in keeping you updated during the conference. If you follow the official @shmoocon Twitter feed during the conference, you should be able to establish a nice flow of information. @podcastmeetup and @securitytwits should also add a good amount of commentary to that base. Additionally, keeping an open search on “#shmoocon” should bring in tons of additional information. I also can’t go without mentioning our own NovaInfosec Twits (@novainfosec) effort. If you follow us and we follow you back, anything you direct message to @novainfosec will be posted in the feed. So if you are interested see our NovaInfosec Twits page to learn how to become part of this localized @securitytwits spin-off. And if you want even more information, you can follow me at @grecs. I’ll be commenting on any of talks or activities I attend.

Well, I think that covers most of the general advice I have. If you can think of anything else, let me and everyone know in the comments below. In my next post, I’ll be discussing Friday’s activities with some recommended talks and other events.

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Tags: conference, event, infosec, nova, reminder, shmoocon, the shmoo group, twitter, update

This entry was posted on February 1, 2009 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Infosec Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.