Well people, it’s the final day of ShmooCon; for those of you who are still nursing hangovers and information overloads, you have my sympathies.

While none of the talks today will be providing alcohol (at least, not that I’m aware of), they will give you a final chance to cram your brain with some interesting information. As I tweeted about on Thursday, Chris Paget will be giving a talk about passport cloning at 11:00am.

While I’ll most likely be attending the talk by Paget, the “Bring It On” track, “Solve this Cipher and Win!” by Michael Schearer at 11:00am also looks interesting.

And if you’re one of the many professionals who’s wondering about what the economy means for people in the security field, check out the “Closing Plenary: Are Bad Times Good for Security Professionals?” at 1:30pm. With G. Mark Hardy, Bruce Potter, Peter Geura, Mark McGovern, and Jack Holleran as moderators, it promises to end ShmooCon with a bit of a controversial bang.

Well, I guess that’s all for now; check back later today and throughout the week for more ShmooCon summaries and discussions. You can also follow me @grecs to get updates throughout the conference today.

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In my last post (“Friday Recommendations“), I discussed some of the official and unofficial activities on Friday and summarized a few things that I’m going to focus on. There are some great planned talks as well as the Podcaster’s Meetup, the FireTalks, and a meetup party courtesy of HacDC.

In this post, I’m going to look at Saturday’s activities and give some recommendations.  As I mentioned previously, please be sure to review the full list of activities yourself just in case I’ve missed something that you might be interested in attending. I wouldn’t want to be blamed for you missing the talk of a lifetime due to my silly preferences.

Oh and before I get started, another ShmooCon ad has been released courtesy of the folks over at PSKL. This one is a hilarious Q&A … Matrix-style.

Saturday starts with the traditional “Built It!, Break It!,” and “Bring It On!” tracks. I’ve never been much of a “Bring It On!” type of person, so I’ll probably gravitate more towards the “Build It! and Break It!” tracks like I’ve done in previous years. Although I personally won’t be attending them, there are several topics in the “Bring It On!” track that really peaked my curiosity, and I’d definitely advise taking a closer look at them if the “Bring It On!” track is your type of thing. But now, back to the “Built It! and Break It!” tracks… 

Starting at 10:00am in the “Break It!” track, the “Exploring Novel Ways in Building Botnets” by Enno Rey and Daniel Mende would be my pick due to my fascination with botnets.  In the “Build It!” track, there seems to be a trend with wireless—another fascination of mine. Because of this fascination, I’ll probably head to Michael Ossmann’s and Dominic Spill’s talk on “Building an All-Channel Bluetooth Monitor” at 11:00am. Continuing on the wireless trend, Joshua Abraham’s and Ben Smith’s talk at noon—“Next Generation Wireless Recon – Visualizing the Airwaves”—looks interesting. Visualization seems to be big these days, especially with the amount of information we have to process to determine a true security event. While this talk focuses on a slightly different theme, it may provide some insights into other visualization techniques.

After a quick lunch at Harry’s Pub (if I can get a table), I’ll most likely be heading over to the must-not-miss Jay Beale talk on “Man in the Middling: Everything with the Middler” at 2:00pm. There has been a lot of talk on multiple mailing lists about the release of his tool, The Middler. So as usual, Jay’s session will probably be standing room only.

Continuing on the wireless trend, the “Building Wireless Sensor Hardware and Software” by Travis Goodspeed and Joshua Gourmeau may be a nice fit at 3:00pm. But the “Break It!” track also seems to include another interesting wireless talk called “802.11 ObgYn or ‘Spread Your Spectrum’” by Rick Farina (which will focus on the topic of tuning your wifi card to operate on licensed frequencies), making it a tough choice between the two. In my opinion, the one with the creative name may win out.

For the last two talks of the day, I’ll probably be focusing on the “Break It!” track. Ennoy Rey and Daniel Mende will be having a busy Saturday as they’ll also be presenting “All Your Packets are Belong to Us: Attacking Backbone Technologies” at 4:00pm.

At 5:00pm, David Kennedy’s talk “The Fast-Track Suite: Advanced Penetration Techniques Made Easy” looks fun. Who can pass up a session with pen testing in the name? Plus you get to learn about an interesting tool built into BackTrack 3.

As the main sessions wind down, the evening activities start to get going. Hack or Halo begins at 6:30pm, the Saturday night edition of FireTalks get going at 7:30pm, and the official ShmooCon party starts at 9:00pm. Hack or Halo consists of two challenges; the “Hack” portion involves teams solving a bunch of puzzles (from simple brainteasers to pwning a computer), and the “Halo” competition involves several rounds of people trying to get body counts as high as possible.  The top competitors from each round move forward until a winner is decided.

If Hack or Halo doesn’t interest you, then the FireTalks at 7:30pm provide another after-dinner option. The exact talks don’t look like they’re going to be decided until 7:30pm. Presentations will be determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. So the first four presenters to the person with the clipboard win! I assume the talks will take place around the press room as they did on Friday night.

If you’re not interested in the FireTalks or the Hack or Halo activities, you can check out PaulDotCom’s live podcast at 8:00pm. You can check out the post on his blog for more details, or you can listen in starting 7:45pm on the PaulDotCom UStream Channel or the PaulDotCom Radio on Icecast.  

But wait, there’s more! After Hack or Halo or the FireTalks, the official Saturday night ShmooCon Party will start at 9:00pm. You can also check out the DualCore DJing Party if you’re in the mood for some creative music. At this point, the location for both parties is still TBD, but be sure to keep up with the various Twitter feeds—@shmoocon, @podcastmeetup, @securitytwits, @novainfosec, @grecs—that I previously mentioned for updates.

In my next post, I’ll be discussing Sunday’s activities as well as our sad return to normal life. And if you’ve heard anything on the final location of the ShmooCon party, please let me and everyone else know in the comments below.

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While I already updated my “ShmooCon 2009 Guide – Friday Recommendations,” post, I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of the schedule changes for this Friday at ShmooCon.

According to Podcasters Meetup, the live show, book signing, and FireTalks on Friday will be happening later than originally planned.

Setup will now start at 7:30pm, with the live show taking place from 8:00-9:00. The book signing will take place during the FireTalks, which start at 9:00.

There will also be a HacDC party that starts at 10:00pm, so be sure to visit the HacDC wiki if you’re interested in learning more.

You can get more updates at the Podcasters Meetup Twitter feed, @podcastmeetup.

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In my last two posts (“Up to this Point” and “General Advice”) I looked at the events leading up to this week and general advice for getting the most out of the conference. In this post I’m going to look at some of the different talks and activities going on Friday.

 As part of this discussion I’ll be giving my recommended activities. Keep in mind that these choices are based on my likes and dislikes. I’d advise reviewing the full list of activities yourself just to make sure you don’t miss anything that’s important to you.

Before I talk about Friday evening, I do want to take a minute to mention the plan for a Security Twits lunch meetup at 12:00pm at Harry’s Pub in the Marriott. If you plan on attending, RSVP at securitytwits{0×40}n0where.org. If you’d like more information, you can visit @securitytwits to see the original tweet.

And now, onto the evening portion of ShmooCon.

In typical ShmooCon fashion, Friday evening is dedicated to the “One Track Mind” talks. Of the “One Track Mind” sessions, three look particularly interesting to me. Being a fan of PaulDotCom and Larry’s imaginative hardware hacking exploits, how could I pass up “Building the 2008 and 2009 ShmooBall Launchers” by Larry Pesce and David Lauer at 4:30? Both SecurityJustice and Securi-D’s Weblog preview what they’ll be discussing.

Following those session, the “The Day Spam Stopped (The Srizbi Botnet Takedown)” talk by Julia Wolf at 5:00 seems like a nice post-mortem of a complex topic that I’m always looking to learn more about. In theory I understand how botnets work, but I’m continually looking for more details of them in action. And seeing a practical application of botnets—which this talk will provide—really drills those theories in.

The final “One Track Mind” session I hope to see is “Watching the Watcher: The Prevalence of Third-Party Web Tracking” by Brent Chapman, Tera Corbari, and Matt Devers at 6:30. Being a mildly paranoid person (which is probably why I migrated into the infosec field), I am always interested in learning more about who and what is profiling me through increasingly complex information gathering techniques. Plus, the advanced tracking mechanisms that many of these organizations use are simply facinating. Learning their techniques would at least help me disrupt their profile building activities. That’s my hope, anyways.

To finish out Friday night’s official activities, I’ll be going to hear what Matt Blaze has to say in his keynote talk. Speaking of Blaze’s talk in particular, one thing that has always bothered me ever so slightly at ShmooCon is that there’s no overview of the keynote. We always get nice bios but nothing concrete on the exact topic. Based on Matt’s background, it’ll probably involve the intersection of security and public policy in some way. Does anyone else have any ideas on his topic? Or did I just miss a major announcement somewhere?

According to Matt’s Wikipedia article, it looks like he’s been involved in some interesting things. He is credited with developing the forerunner of IPSec in ‘93, circumventing the wiretapping capabilities of the Clipper chip in ‘94, and rediscovering a vulnerability in “master key” security in physical locks in ’03. (It’s technically a “rediscovery” because it was an open secret among locksmiths). He also coined the term “trust management,” which means to “refer to the policy system which decides whether a particular entity should be permitted to carry out a particular action.” Currently, Matt is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Next come several unofficial ShmooCon Friday night events that you may want to take part in. There is some overlap with the official talks but you may want to check out the Podcaster’s Meetup. Setup begins at 7:30, with the live show starting at 8:00. Podcasters taking part include Hak5, PaulDotCom, CyberSpeak, Sucurabit, Security Justice, SploitCase, Unpersons, Phone Losers of America, and SMBMinute. After the recording, there will be some time for getting your books signed if you’re interested.

The FireTalks then start at 9:00. For those of you who don’t know, the FireTalk sessions include several 10 to 15 minute talks by those who have something interesting to say, but didn’t get accepted by ShmooCon or didn’t submit their proposed talk in time.

If you’d like more information, you can view the Podcaster’s Meetup post about the FireTalks, which I’ve pasted part of below.

“Have a talk that didn’t get accepted? Want the chance to share a project that you are working on? Think of FireTalks as a verbal blog post.

 The human experience is built on the ability to tell and learn from stories. At SchmooCon 2009, “FireTalks” is a supportive environment in which to either share insights or learn from others. Whether polishing a presentation (story) for conferences, meetings or training, FireTalks are the way to share, learn and improve.

 The inaugural FireTalks take place Friday night — following the Podcasters Meetup. Talks are limited to 10-15 minutes with four (4) scheduled talks and four (4) open slots. Open slots will be filled on a first come, first serve basis.

 Saturday night will be more relaxed. Come join us and present, listen and learn.”

Both the Podcaster’s Meeting and the FireTalks will take place somewhere around the press room. I guess we’ll have to figure out the location once we get there. As I mentioned in the “General Advice” post, be sure to check Twitter for constant updates about the conference.

Afterward the FireTalks are over, continue the fun with some networking at a local spot. Or if you’re interested, CharmSec is having a meetup after the keynote. Be sure to check it out if you can. You can view @charmsec for additional details. You may also want to follow @podcastmeetup on Twitter to get any last minute updates.

If there’s anything I’ve missed, please feel free to let me know by leaving a comment below.  Praise and criticism (and by that, I mean constructive feedback) is always appreciated. Additionally, has anyone figured out what the keynote topic is or where the post Podcaster’s Meetup/FireTalks “local spot” is going to be?

In my next post, I’ll be discussing Saturday’s activities with some recommended talks and other events. Choosing which sessions to attend will definitely be a lot harder given the wide range of options.

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