SANS@Night

I got home from Orlando the day before yesterday.  My spouse went to training.  He took the children and I along to Orlando so that we could have kind of a vacation.  I say "kind of" because anyone who has been on vacation with children knows that it is still 24/7 watching the children.  Magnify that times 100 at the parks because they want to do everything.  They got me onto a couple of roller coasters-they were the baby roller coasters, but anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of rollercoasters.  My middle child takes after me; he doesn't like the roller coasters either.

Someone arranged for me to get a SANS Guest badge.  I attended a SANS@Night.  I wish that I had more opportunities to attend the SANS@Night talks.  My spouse was in a bootcamp style course, so he didn't get out until most of the SANS@Night talks were over.  Someone, AKA, me had to watch the children.

I absolutely loved the SANS@Night talk that I attended.  It was "Malware Analysis for Incident Responders:  Getting Started" by Lenny Zeltser.  I never thought of reverse malware engineering as being in the realm of possibilities for myself as far as career aspirations.  I thought that I needed extensive programming skills as well as knowledge of assembly.  Turns out, that isn't so.  I can explore malware with less knowledge than I thought.  Don't get me wrong, I still want to learn as much as I can.  I want to know how things work.  I just realize that I shouldn't be intimidated, and I should just try and see what I can do.  I plan on firing up Remnux and looking at some of the resources that I was given in the SANS@Night talk.

Currently, I'm still doing the Linux Foundation Training.  I'm looking at the evidence for the Black T-Shirt challenge.  I don't actually plan on submitting anything for it.  I just find that it's good practice.  I used ewfmount to mount the E01 files that were given in the challenge.  It's pretty neat that I can see everything on that drive and use tools like bulk extractor to automatically get information off of the disk for me.  I'm trying to see if I can use Volatility on one the images now that I have it mounted.  Not sure if that is possible.  I'm going to keep researching about it.

SANS@Night

My spouse was kind enough to request that I get a badge so that I could attend some SANS@night presentations.  I've only been to two, because there are many of them that my spouse would like to attend, and someone has to watch the kids.

The first one that I attended was a SANS WIT presentation.  Their hash tag is #SANS_WIT.  It was a networking event for women to meet other women in technology, and to learn about SANS programs that may help women.  I can't discuss specifically what was in the presentation, but suffice it to say, if you are a woman, interested in the IT field, you may want to attend one of these presentations.  I felt awkward.  I'm a stay at home mom listening to ladies say, "I'm the Chief Security Officer at ...". They asked what I did.  I feel like I probably sounded like a country bumpkin.  "I'm just a stay at home mom who has done a couple consulting/contract jobs from home, and I do pen-testing/digital forensics challenges for fun."  I told them that I was invited to an invite only cyber camp in my state.  It didn't help that I had recently lost some weight, so I was wearing pants and a shirt that was hanging off of me.  Those were my issues, though, not the other ladies.  They seemed like nice people.

The second one was Securing Your Kids.  Most of the information was common sense practices that most people would do, but there were some insightful ideas given by other parents, so it may be worth attending.  I was tempted to skip this one and attend more technical presentations.