To follow up with Friday’s post re getting a lot of the other awesome ShmooCon Firetalks out there, here is the complete line up from Saturday night. And if you are interested in seeing all the talks from each night, IronGeek has just put out a post with two longer videos from each evening.

I again wanted to thank The Shmoo Group and our generous sponsors. Lastly, thanks to our awesome volunteers that made this year’s Firetalks the best so far. Thanks!

• CFP Review: @jack_daniel, Sarah “@dystonic” Clarke, @jasonmoliver, Nathi “@nathiet” Thwala
• Judges: @DaKahuna2007, Rob “@mubix” Fuller, Nicolle “@rogueclown” Neulist, @soapturtle
• Streaming/Recording: @georgiaweidman, Adrian “@irongeek_adc” Crenshaw
• Security: Boris “@JadedSecurity” Sverdlik, Casey “@caseydunham” Dunham, @judykavuo

And finally be sure to check back to the master Firetalks post. It provides the core content as well as quick links to all update blog posts.  Well on to the videos…

“Cracking WiFi Protected Setup For Fun and Profit”

by Craig Heffner

This talk will detail the recently disclosed vulnerability in WiFi Protected Setup which allows wireless attackers to recover plain text WPA/WPA2 pass phrases in just a few hours, as well as my WPS brute force attack tool, Reaver.

“Passive Aggressive Pwnage: Sniffing the Net for Fun & Profit”

by John Sawyer

There has been very little public research into passive fingerprinting over the last few years, and the best and most well-known tool for that (p0f) hasn’t been actively developed in 6 years. While a recent a project is using the clever technique of identifying OS’s through DHCP options, it isn’t looking beyond simple OS identification. Why not? If you’ve ever been responsible for IDS monitoring in a large environment, you know there’s a huge amount of juicy data waiting to be snarfed up–interesting information that could be collected passively to identify vulnerable targets in a pen test. Some commercial solutions have these passive vulnerability detection capabilities already, but it’s never trickled down into the free, open source world.

In this presentation, we will look at some of the data that can be gleaned passively, how it can be used for offensive (and defensive) purposes, and announce a new project designed to use existing open source IDS engines (Snort & Suricata) and IDS rules to enhance penetration tests through passive fingerprinting. The project will utilize existing rules from projects like Emerging Threats, develop new rules to address gaps in detection, and give back to the community by contributing newly developed rules back to similar projects. A focus will be on identifying bleeding edge devices, vulnerable applications, and passively gathering sensitive information (SSNs, CCNs, passwords, etc.).

“Ressurecting Ettercap”

by Eric Milam

In December 2011 Ettercap had its first official release in almost 6 years. This talk will discuss how I went from the creation of a simple bash script to taking over one of the world most loved penetration testing tools. Topics will include, easy-creds, communications with Alor & Naga and the new team charged with moving the project forward.

“Security Onion: Network Security Monitoring in Minutes”

by Doug Burks

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can be costly, difficult to install, and may not provide all the capabilities that you need to defend your network. Network Security Monitoring (NSM) combines traditional IDS alerts with additional data to give you a more complete picture of what’s happening on your network. This presentation will demonstrate how to deploy NSM in just a few minutes using a free Linux distro called Security Onion.

“Remotely Exploiting the PHY Layer”

by Travis Goodspeed

Packet-in-Packet injections are a new type of in-band signalling attack, one which allows a packet to be injected into a remote wireless network through the body of any other type of packet. The attacker never needs a radio, and no software or hardware bugs are necessary for the injection to occur. The attack works on perfectly standard-compliant implementations of 802.15.4, 802.11B, and most other wireless protocols.

#####

This will be the final ShmooCon 2012 FireTalks post. It’s been a blast! See ya…Today’s post image is brought to you from Wikipedia.org.

I had the great opportunity to attend ShmooCon 2012 two weekends ago. As most of you know, the con offered various hacker models and infosec discussions. Friday and Saturday night activities concluded with a series of 15-minute sessions known as Firetalks in which the presenter cuts to the chase and discuses the core content of their presentation.

Here are some of my lessons learned for the next Shmooby…

Program Confusion: As a first timer, I was obviously confused about the whole program. It took me a while to figure out what I needed to do first and the different locations of the various activities and talks.

Talk Overload: It’s ok … you do not have to attend all the talks. This is extremely exhausting and you miss all the other fun stuff like lock picking, Hack Fortress, and so forth. The sessions are usually recorded so you can always catch-up on what you missed later.

Stressful Commute: If you are a local, I recommend staying at the hotel if possible as it ensures you do not get burned out with the commute each day. This also gives you extra cycles to network with others in the evening as well as adequate time to get ready for talks in the morning.

Unintelligible Content: Don’t feel bad if you attend a talk and don’t understand the content. We all have our strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the different subjects in the infosec world.

#####

That’s it for now. Do you have any more advice for the next Shmooby? Please let us know in the comments below. Today’s post image is from the EFF.com.

Last night we put out a post with the ShmooCon 2012 FireTalks winners so this morning we thought we’d follow up with a quick article on some of the other talks that occurred last weekend. This post is dedicated to the talks on Friday night. Thanks to Bulb Security and IronGeek for recording and processing the videos so fast!

And finally be sure to check back to the master Firetalks post. It provides the core content as well as quick links to all update blog posts.  Well on to the videos…

“Exploiting PKI for Pentesters”

by Thomas Hoffecker

Based upon my hour long talk presented at DerbyCon and HackerCon. This 15 minute version is specifically aimed at pentesters. PKI provides a large source of information to pentesters. Signed and encrypted email establishes a level of trust. Many organizations employ PKI but do not provide much public information about it. Pentesters are already trained to find this information using the recon phase of pentesting. Analysis of public PKI certificates can provide information on the internal infrastructure of the target. While the target may have deployed a split DNS architecture many times only a single PKI system is deployed. If public certificates are be accessed then potential servers and other interesting equipment can be identified since the PKI cert will contain the fully qualified domain name. While phishing success rates remain high, utilizing encrypted or signed email makes an email that much more trust worthy. It also ensures that spam and virus scanners at the mail server cannot read the email contents. Encrypting the email provides assurance that only the targeted subject can open and read the email. User security awareness training teaches users that signed and encrypted email is absolutely safe. Beyond my existing talks’ content I will demonstrate means to find information of specific corporate PKI implementations. Provide examples to obtain PKI email certificates from public sources for those that do not publish or otherwise distribute PKI email certificates. I will also discuss recently publicly revealed attack against smartcards that store PKI certificates, examples of these smart cards include the DoD CAC and the HSPD-12 PIV cards.

“Bending SAP Over & Extracting What You Need!”

by Chris John Riley

At the heart of any large enterprise, lies a platform misunderstood and feared by all but the bravest systems administrators. Home to a wealth of information, and key to infinite wisdom. This platform is SAP. For years this system has been amongst the many “red pen” items on penetration tests and audits alike… but no more! We will no longer accept the cries of “Business critical, out-of-scope”. The time for SAP has come, the cross-hairs of attackers are firmly focused on the soft underbelly that is ERM, and it’s our duty to follow suit. Join me as we take the first steps into exploring SAP, extracting information and popping shells. Leave your Nessus license at the door! It’s time to scrub this SAP system clean with SOAP!

“ROUTERPWN: A Mobile Router Exploitation Framework”

by Pedro Joaquin

Routerpwn is a mobile exploitation framework that helps you in the exploitation of vulnerabilities in network devices such as residential and commercial routers, switches and access points. It is a compilation of ready to run local and remote web exploits. Programmed in Javascript and HTML in order to run in all “smart phones” and mobile Internet devices, including Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and all tablets. You can even store it off line for local exploitation without Internet connection.

“Security Is Like An Onion, That’s Why it Makes You Cry”

by Michele Chubirka

Why is the security industry so full of fail? We spend millions of dollars on firewalls, IPS, IDS, DLP, professional penetration tests and assessments, vulnerability and compliance tools and at the end of the day, the weakest link is the user and his or her inability to make the right choices. It’s enough to make a security engineer cry. The one thing you can depend upon in an enterprise is that many of our users, even with training, will still make the wrong choices. They still click on links they shouldn’t, respond to phishing scams, open documents without thinking, post too much information on Twitter and Facebook, use their pet’s name as passwords, etc…. But what if this isn’t because users hate us or are too stupid? What if all our complaints about not being heard and our instructions regarding the best security practices have more to do with our failure to understand modern neuroscience and the human mind’s resistance to change?

“Five Ways We’re Killing Our Own Privacy”

by Michael Schearer

At DEFCON, I talked about how our privacy rights are under attack. Our sea of liberty is drying up due to the ever-encroaching power of the government. A litany of abuses continue to chip away at the historical foundations of privacy: administrative searches as pretexts to avoid search warrants, national security letter, and suffocating public surveillance just to name a few. Yet the government alone is not the only source of our ever-diminishing privacy. In this talk, I turn my attention…to you. Yes, believe it or not, you (and me) and the other 310 million of us in this country are also responsible for our diminished expectation of privacy. Why are we responsible? Who wants our information, and why is it so valuable? Is there anything we can do to stem the tide?

“How Do You Know Your Colo Isn’t ‘Inside’ Your Cabinet, A Simple Alarm Using Teensy”

by David Zendzian

As everyone knows, the security of your equipment starts with securing it physically. To accomplish that many will lease cabinet or cage space within the a commercial colo. However, all colos require access to your equipment (in case of fire, or other emergency). Even withstanding the emergency access I have seen colo’s enter cages and cabinets to run cables or to shorten their walk around a row in the facility. Other than installing a commercial alarm or a motion sensor camera, both of which are expensive solutions, what can be done to monitor access into your cabinet or cage. This talk will show how we have used a Teensy board from PJRC to build a simple alarm system that can be easily integrated into whatever host / network monitoring system already configured for your network.

#####

An interesting thing happened this year … none of the talks on Friday night won. Maybe this gave the Saturday presenters time to pay the judges off. This post’s featured image is from Babble.com. See ya…

Well you’ve probably already heard by now but just in case you didn’t … here are the winners for this year’s ShmooCon 2012 Firetalks. Also, be sure to check back to the master Firetalks post. It provides the core content as well as quick links to all update blog posts.

Well on to the winners…

Win: “Remotely Exploiting the PHY Layer”

by Travis Goodspeed

Packet-in-Packet injections are a new type of in-band signalling attack, one which allows a packet to be injected into a remote wireless network through the body of any other type of packet. The attacker never needs a radio, and no software or hardware bugs are necessary for the injection to occur. The attack works on perfectly standard-compliant implementations of 802.15.4, 802.11B, and most other wireless protocols.

Travis won a Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter along with an iPod Touch to control it. Thanks to Milton Security Group supplying this awesome prize!

Place: “Cracking WiFi Protected Setup For Fun and Profit”

by Craig Heffner

This talk will detail the recently disclosed vulnerability in WiFi Protected Setup which allows wireless attackers to recover plain text WPA/WPA2 pass phrases in just a few hours, as well as my WPS brute force attack tool, Reaver.

Craig picked up a netbook with the latest version of BackTrack pre-installed. Thanks to Dirty Security, Lares Consulting, and Leverage Consulting & Associates for supporting this prize. [Oh and Craig ... please contact us so we can arrange to ship the netbook to you.]

Show: “Ressurecting Ettercap”

by Eric Milam

In December 2011 Ettercap had its first official release in almost 6 years. This talk will discuss how I went from the creation of a simple bash script to taking over one of the world most loved penetration testing tools. Topics will include, easy-creds, communications with Alor & Naga and the new team charged with moving the project forward.

Eric took home the “Sad Trombone” award, basically one of Apple’s new iPad Minis. Thanks to Liquidmatrix Security Digest for supplying the third place prize!

#####

Congratulations to all the winners! Today’s featured image is from Sasatien.Blogspot.com. See ya!

Just a short post to announce the second round speakers for this year’s ShmooCon Firetalks… With several more submissions between our last post and the CFP due date, the selection committee has been hard at work trying to pull together a diverse program with the most interesting talks combined with a good mix of established and new speakers.

But before we get on to the talks I just wanted to thank the selection committee for all the hard work they put in over the last few weeks. Since some may not want their full names out there, I’ll just list them all by their Twitter handles … @dystonic, @jack_daniel, @jasonmoliver and @nathiet. And I would again like to thank our generous sponsors for not only providing some awesome prizes but also other contributions that are going to make this year’s Firetalks the best so far. Thanks!

• Milton Security Group
• Dirty Security
• Lares Consulting
• Leverage Consulting & Associates
• Liquidmatrix Security Digest
• Bulb Security

And finally if you want to keep up with all the Firetalks going-ons, be sure to check back to the master Firetalks post periodically. It is the home for any and all information relating to the ShmooCon 2012 FireTalks. You can also subscribe to receive these updates through any of our “feeds” if you wish (@novainfosec on Twitter, our FaceBook Page, or RSS) to keep up with things. And as usual … I’ll be regularly updating my Twitter stream at @grecs with all the information using the #firetalks tag.

And without further ado … we are pleased to announce the second round speakers!!!

Cracking WiFi Protected Setup For Fun and Profit

by Craig Heffner

This talk will detail the recently disclosed vulnerability in WiFi Protected Setup which allows wireless attackers to recover plain text WPA/WPA2 pass phrases in just a few hours, as well as my WPS brute force attack tool, Reaver.

Passive Aggressive Pwnage: Sniffing the Net for Fun & Profit

by John Sawyer

There has been very little public research into passive fingerprinting over the last few years, and the best and most well-known tool for that (p0f) hasn’t been actively developed in 6 years. While a recent a project is using the clever technique of identifying OS’s through DHCP options, it isn’t looking beyond simple OS identification. Why not? If you’ve ever been responsible for IDS monitoring in a large environment, you know there’s a huge amount of juicy data waiting to be snarfed up–interesting information that could be collected passively to identify vulnerable targets in a pen test. Some commercial solutions have these passive vulnerability detection capabilities already, but it’s never trickled down into the free, open source world.

In this presentation, we will look at some of the data that can be gleaned passively, how it can be used for offensive (and defensive) purposes, and announce a new project designed to use existing open source IDS engines (Snort & Suricata) and IDS rules to enhance penetration tests through passive fingerprinting. The project will utilize existing rules from projects like Emerging Threats, develop new rules to address gaps in detection, and give back to the community by contributing newly developed rules back to similar projects. A focus will be on identifying bleeding edge devices, vulnerable applications, and passively gathering sensitive information (SSNs, CCNs, passwords, etc.).

Remotely Exploiting the PHY Layer

by Travis Goodspeed

Packet-in-Packet injections are a new type of in-band signalling attack, one which allows a packet to be injected into a remote wireless network through the body of any other type of packet. The attacker never needs a radio, and no software or hardware bugs are necessary for the injection to occur. The attack works on perfectly standard-compliant implementations of 802.15.4, 802.11B, and most other wireless protocols.

Ressurecting Ettercap

by Eric Milam

In December 2011 Ettercap had its first official release in almost 6 years. This talk will discuss how I went from the creation of a simple bash script to taking over one of the world most loved penetration testing tools. Topics will include, easy-creds, communications with Alor & Naga and the new team charged with moving the project forward.

Security Onion: Network Security Monitoring in Minutes

by Doug Burks

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can be costly, difficult to install, and may not provide all the capabilities that you need to defend your network. Network Security Monitoring (NSM) combines traditional IDS alerts with additional data to give you a more complete picture of what’s happening on your network. This presentation will demonstrate how to deploy NSM in just a few minutes using a free Linux distro called Security Onion.

Beyond the formally announced talks we also chose a few alternates that just missed getting selected. These speakers should be ready to present either night.

• Georgia Weidman: Stopping Android Permission Leak
• Thomas Hoffecker: Exploiting PKI for Pentesters

#####

Look for the final schedule to be posted early next week. See ya!

Today’s the day … or at least one of three days throughout the year where we drop everything around 11:55 AM EST, head over over to the ShmooCon registration page, and starting F5ing the hell out of our computers with the hope of getting a barcode. Being someone that’s attended ShmooCon for four or so years now, I thought I’d pull together some of my tips for getting ShmooCon tickets. I’ve written about this previously however the ticket process has significantly changed since 2009.

Tip #1 – Read & Become Familiar with the ShmooCon Purchase Instructions: This is a repeat from my 2009 tips but is still very relevant today. It comes from the organizers themselves and one we should all take seriously. They explained the whole process in the “So the actual process will go like this” section on the registration page.

Tip #2 – Keep Refreshing to Buy Tickets Even if You Get a Sold Out Message: Here’s another repeat from 2009 and I’ve anecdotally found it continues to be helpful. After you get the dreaded “sold out” message … fear not. In previous years there’s been reports that the ticket system would let some slip through even after 30 minutes. So even if you get that message saying to wait until the next month, just keep refreshing…

Tip #3 – Disable Chrome HTTP Throttle: Chome has a lot of great security features built in … including this fellow. It is a self-defense mechanism that helps prevent “Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from being perpetrated by web pages and extensions.” Unfortunately, this bit me last time. I was refreshing Safari as well so I don’t think I affected me that much. Anyway to disable it enter “chrome://net-internals/#httpThrottling” into the URL field and uncheck the box.

Tip #4 – F5 on Two Computers: Getting tickets that sell out in 10 seconds is pretty much a lottery. So the more times you enter, the better chance you have to win and with at least two computers you are doubling your chances to win. As the Shmoo High-Availability Moose Cluster starts to slow down this technique also gives you something to do while anxiously waiting page refreshes. You could go to three machines but I think you might loose focus and miss the magic “click here to reserve your barcode” and accidentally refresh again. Also if you don’t have access to two computers, at least bring up two browsers and let them fight it out.

Tip #4b – Learn How to Refresh on Macs: Related to the F5 tip above … if you are on a Mac, hitting F5 isn’t going to do you a lot of good. The key combination that I found that consistently works on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari is “Command – R” instead. For Firefox you can also hit “fn – F5″ but that didn’t seem to work for any of the other browsers.

Tip #5 – Disable All Security Add-Ons/Extensions: I don’t think it should affect things that much as the ShmooCon site doesn’t seem to rely on any third-party mashup technologies. But to be on the safe side I’d turn off add-ons like NoScript, HTTP-Everywhere, and Adblock Plus just in case they trip the browser up. Also disabling any of the other add-ons might speed the browser up some.

Bonus Tip – Just Wait: If you really want to attend and weren’t lucky enough to grab a barcode, all hope is not lost. I’ve seen a lot of tickets come available a few weeks just before the con. Plans change, emergencies come up, or work deadlines move… And there’s always eBay. Most people out in the security community that I know aren’t looking to sell these tickets for a profit so become part of the community and one should turn up.

Good luck to everyone… At @shmoocon‘s signal unleash hell.

#####

You know of any surefire tips on getting the sacred barcodes? Let us know in the comments below. And afterwords why not comment on what did and did not work. Today’s post image is from ShmooCon.org.

One thing we like to do here is provide summaries of events that happen around the area. Recaps of multi-day conferences are pretty time-consuming to write and thus I don’t notice too many of them getting published. Fortunately, Ben “@falconsview” Tomhave wrote up his reflections on the ISSA Intentional Conference held last month and he gave us permission to repost his article.

If you happen to attend one of the local meetups or conferences and want to write up your thoughts, we’d be glad to host it for you. Also even if you don’t have time to write a full recap, feel free to leave your take-aways and opinions by commenting on any of the events in our calendar.

And without further ado here’s Ben’s post…

#####

“Reflections on 2011 ISSA Int’l Conference”

I had the opportunity to attend the 2011 ISSA International Conference held Oct 20-21 in Baltimore, MD. Overall, it was a decent, albeit fairly small, event. Beyond getting a chance to catch-up with some industry friends, it also provided a chance to hear a few interesting talks, as well as to discuss a couple topics that have been of interest lately.

Rather than recap things in too much detail, I figured I’d just riff on a few themes that I noticed (or have arbitrarily declared)…

The Cloud!

There were two key federal speakers: Gen. Alexander (US Cyber Command) and Shawn Henry (FBI). Both talked at length about the move to the cloud, and confirmed the news we also heard simultaneously from the intel sector that the US Government is moving to “the cloud.” So, yeah… NIST has recently finalized SP 800-145 [PDF] defining “cloud” for everyone… and now, watch as apps and data head that way. It’s going to pose an interesting challenge, but nothing I’m sure they won’t be able to out-botch.

In all seriousness, though, I think there is reasonably good potential that moving to cloud-based services will help reduce costs. Although, at the same time, I can’t help being a bit cynical since major government contractors could easily pick up the servers they’ve been running at agencies, move them into off-site data centers, and then declare it “cloud” and increase the cost for doing almost the exact same work (plus the actual hosting). And, this assumes a case where they’re not already hosting. Anyway…

Suffice to say, “cloud” will continue to be a hot keyword for the fed sector for the foreseeable future.

That Old “Cyber Crime > Drug Trade” Schtick

The other thing trotted out by both Gen. Alexander and EAD Henry was this notion that cyber crime now costs more than the drug trade each year. It’s unclear to me the actually source of this assertion, though I vaguely remember reading a blog post recently that debunked the myth, tracing it back to an old vendor report of some sort that did some fuzzy logic and bad math.

That said, “cyber crime” is certainly impacting life and businesses – enough so for the SEC to issue that guidance on reporting the material impact of cyber risks within quarterly reports by public companies. This is very much a “David v Goliath” type situation, too, in that there’s really no realistic way to staff-up defensive forces or law enforcement agencies in order to fully pursue and prosecute attackers.

At any rate… actual losses may be farther away than what we are hearing, but to know that would require a whole lot more reporting and information sharing… which was another related topic mentioned during both talks, along with renewed calls for increased public/private partnerships (always a rally cry, never a success?).

These Problems Are Hard

One common thread from various conversations and a few talks is that there are many hard problems to solve, and none with any obvious answers. Risk assessment and analysis? Difficult. Prioritizing bugs or IT projects? Difficult. Trying to get people to agree to a common set of definitions around key terms like “risk”? Darn-near impossible. And so the litany can go on…

Of course, while there are certainly difficult problems, there are also lots of unqualified people willing to talk about these problems. For example, I suffered through a talk by an auditor dude who didn’t understand the first thing about risk management or risk assessment. He criticized risk analysis techniques, but wanted to discard all of risk management as a result. Yet, he described as preferable fairly standard risk mgmt processes. *shrug* Most interesting was this little exchange:

Me: “If risk management is out, then how do you prioritize what work to do first?”
Him: “You fix the simple things first.”
Me: “Ok, a follow-up. Say I’ve fixed all the simple things… now what?”
Him: “I don’t know. There’s no good way of dealing with this today.”

Ummmm… yeah. No doubt. So, that was interesting. That said, I also had a good conversation with a really smart dude about prioritization, and while we didn’t reach any conclusions, we certainly realized that there are some interesting challenges, particularly with defining the problem-space (what’s the desired outcome?), that make developing solutions a bit of a challenge.

Maturing Risk Management: Learning to Talk to Grown-Ups

Two of the more interesting sessions I attended talked about, well, how to talk to the execs and board about security. One was a CISO/CSO panel that spent a good amount of time talking about this topic. They discussed how you can’t just go throw around FUD these days, or ask for blank checks, but rather have to approach business leaders using business language in order to frame business problems.

The other good talk was specifically on how to speak to execs, spending a fair amount of time on do’s and don’t's. It was very interesting, though mostly intuitive, or so one would hope, though perhaps it’s not nearly as intuitive as I thought it might be. Mainly, a lot of the tips were inline with what the panel said. Don’t drop bombs on the execs, empower them to make good decisions, avoid “told ya so” moments, and so on. Overall, good stuff!

—

So, that’s my summary. It seemed like a smaller turnout this year, perhaps due in part to Raleigh ISSA having a conference at the same time. I’ve not heard official numbers, but I’d be surprised if it was more than a 300 people (Raleigh drew >400). The vendor expo area seemed much smaller this year than last year, which had to be a bit disappointing. Overall, I don’t think attendees were as happy with the venue or level of organization (or, chaos) present. Hopefully next year we can rebound. I know that one pressing issue on the minds of chapter leads was how to make/keep ISSA relevant today in light of all the other security-oriented groups around. Talk about a hard problem to solve…

#####

Check out the full post and any follow-up comments over on Ben’s blog post. Today’s post pic is from ISSA.org. That page also includes some nice highlights from the conference … so even more to read.

The good folks over at Reverse Space have been planning a mini-con happening tomorrow (Saturday) starting around noon. It’ll mostly consist of NoVA peeps giving the presentations they gave in Las Vegas last month. This includes me presenting my “How to Win Followers and Influence Friends: Hacking Twitter to Boost Your Security Career” from BSidesLV. Anyway, here is their official “press release” with all the info.

#####

RSCon

Saturday, September 17, 2011, starts at 12PM

RSCon is the first mini-convention organized by Reverese Space members.

This isn’t a normal ‘con’ in the sense of DefCon, Blackhat, etc. This is more a chance for those that gave talks over the summer to give them again to those people that are here locally and couldn’t make it. The idea started when a few people who where speaking said they wouldn’t mind giving the talks again here in the fall. With that we consolidated those people together and arranged one day for them to all give their talks.

• Grecs: How to Win Followers and Influence Friends: Hacking Twitter to Boost Your Security Career
• Tiffany Rad: SCADA & PLCs in Correctional Facilities: The Nightmare Before Christmas
• Joe Klient: Your first IPv6 Pen Test – Discovering the Target
• Joey (l0stknowledge): We’re (The Government) Here To Help: A Look At How FIPS 140 Helps (And Hurts) Security
• DeKahuna: Wireless Contest (bring your BackTrack installs!)

#####

I hope to you can make it. See ya!

As you know “calendaring” is something we do a lot of around NovaInfosecPortal. We have our calendar that focuses on meetups and conferences around NoVA, DC, and southern MD. In populating the conferences portion of this calendar, we not only rely people tweeting about them and visiting various meetup and conference websites but also hit up a lot of general security calendar sites to verify we didn’t miss anything happening local. So when follow DC infosec professional and artist Jack “@sintixerr” Whitsitt sent out the following tweet a few weeks ago it got me thinking.

“@sintixerr is there a good list or calendar or upcoming security/hacker conferences for the year? #“

I’ve seen this question before and have come across several lists like this over the years. As a matter of fact there is one post in particular that got me started on this whole idea of running some type of list or calendar. I didn’t want to just recreate yet another calendar but something that would be useful for people on a continual basis. This goal is what led me to include meetups as well. Of course trying to run a calendar with both conferences and meetups on a worldwide scale is next to impossible. That’s when I decided to just focus on the local DC area. This made things much more manageable!

As you can imagine in narrowing down to this niche, we’ve come across a lot of different conference calendars over the years and I thought I’d share this list with everyone. Here is my prioritized list with some commentary on each one.

• Information Security Events: I’m not really sure who owns this calendar but it contains most of the well known security conferences as well as associated CFP deadlines for them. Google Calendar is used as a source so you get direct access as well as many of the other Google features (e.g., importing ICS into your own calendar).
• Infosec Events North America & Worldwide Conferences and Workshops: Here are two nice little infosec event calendars that focus on North America and the rest of the world. Direct links are also provided to their Google Calendar feeds, which provides a bunch of other nice
  features as discussed above.
• Help Net Security Conferences Listing: This site is not only a great news resource but they also run a very comprehensive calendar of infosec events. It features a filtering capability that lets you quickly find events by month, quarter, and/or continent.
• The Ethical Hacker Network Conference Calendar: Not only is this a great calendar of infosec conferences but each event also has its own forum thread where EHN registered users can discuss each conference.
• Crucial Point Federal Technology Events: This calendar contains many of the federal technology events and a fair portion of what they list is infosec related. Again, they are hosted on Google Calendar so it supports all their features. For more federal events they recommend checking out GovEvents.com.
• DC Tech Events: Although not a pure infosec calendar, many of the local security events usually end up there. You can subscribe to get their events via email, import their iCal feed into your own personal calendar, or follow them on Twitter at @dctechevents to stay abreast of their posted events.

If you know of any other calendars that I may have missed please add a comment below, Contact Us, or mention it to me (@grecs) on Twitter. I hope to keep this list updated as a resource for people to use. And of course if you’re local to DC, our full calendar should have pretty much everything you need.

#####

In creating a locally focused infosec site, I’ve also come across other resources besides calendars that I’d like to share over the next few weeks or months. So keep an eye out here for more non-NoVA, DC, & MD resources that I found over the years. See ya! This post’s image was from Western Michigan University.

Ok, now that I’ve had a week to recover from ShmooCon, I just wanted to officially wrap up the FireTalks for this year with a quick post announcing the winners and pointing to some other related resources.

This year had 12 awesome presentations but only three could come out on top. The judges ranked each talk from 1 to 10. At the end we added them up to determine the winners. For 2011 the ShmooCon FireTalk winners are:

• Second Runner Up: Lisa “@llorenzin” Lorenzin – “What I Learned about Security at Burning Man”
• First Runner Up: Dave Marcus – “Using Social Networks to Profile, Find andOwn Your Victims”
• Grand Prize: Schuyler “@Shoebox” Towne – “We Need to Start Attacking Disc Detainer Locks”

Once again congrats to the winners! Schuyler won an iPad provided by Astaro while Dave and Lisa won an Asus netbook and a $100 ThinkGeek gift certificate, respectively. Aplura provided the two runner-up prizes.

Also if you are not on Twitter and haven’t heard @irongeek_adc had the FireTalk videos out on Monday after the con. Wow, what an amazing job to get them out that fast! Thanks Adrien. You can find them here. And for those that were able to watch live, please also send a big thank you to @vincentkadmon.

I’ll update the master post with all this information where you should be able to find everything.

Once again I like to thank everyone involved in making FireTalks happen this year. From awesome sponsors (Aplura and Astaro) to the many volunteers (Jack “@jack_daniel” Daniel, Adrian “@irongeek_adc” Crenshaw, Georgia “@vincentkadmon” Weidman, Mike “@rybolov” Smith, Nathi “@nathiet” Thwala, Jason “@jasonmoliver” Oliver, “@DaKahuna2007“, and Mike “@theprez98” Schearer), our recruited judges (“@shrdlu”, James “@mycurial” Arlen, and Melanie Smith), and especially the ShmooCon team (“@heidishmoo“, “@gdead“, and everyone else involved in Team “@shmoocon“). Thanks for a great time and another successful year. See ya!