“You are about to begin the hero’s journey. Travel well on the quest. A life of More is your birthright. Know the vast resource that reside in you and are provided for you in the world. You have raised the battle cry of There Must Be More Than This.”
– Judith Wright
I am not going to do any predictions. No Tarot card reading today. I have been busy traveling. I went up to Virginia Beach where I volunteered as a SANS room monitor for Hacker Techniques, Exploits & Incident Handling. I took the course several years ago when SANS was first introducing the certification program. While I did become certified, I let the certification expire a few years back. I figured enough had changed, and/or I had forgotten enough to make taking the course again worth while.
It was a very valuable class. Ed Skoudis is an interesting instructor. He is very good. There is no denying he knows his material. He is very precise with his instruction. The first time I met Ed was just before taking the course several years ago. We were both in Eric Cole’s course and Ed sat next to me. I was not aware that Ed was an instructor nor did I realize that he was friends with Eric. I thought he was a regular student. During Eric’s lecture, Ed kept keeping track of how many minutes Eric spent on each slide. I thought Ed was some obsessive compulsive individual as he muttered, “He needs to speed up if before the break he hopes to get to slide …”
It turns out Eric and Ed were covering each other courses, and Ed was very familiar with the timing and material. Eric and Ed teaching styles are very different. With Ed, he knows how long each slide should be and where he needs to be at any point of the class. He’ll make statements concerning the exercises that, “This should take about 6 minutes.” I always found the use of “about” with an exact number like “6 minutes” or “14 minutes” fascinating. Ed’s class is a fast paced, well practiced, and an exact executed course. Eric, on the other hand, likes to present based on the audience. If the audience members seem confused, he will spend more time on the topic. If they seemed bored, he will pick up the pace and cover the material more rapidly. Both are fantastic instructors. They just have different styles.
Thanks to the magic of podcasting, you can listen to both men without any costs. At the end of August, Gary McGraw interviewed Eric on Show 017 of the Silver Bullet podcast. It was a very entertaining podcast. Gary and Eric discuss demonstrating security ROI, the academic approach to security versus practitioner certification models, and what kinds of training makes for good network security practitioners. Also at the end of August, PaulDotCom had an interview with Ed on Episode 80. Ed, Tom Liston, and Matthew Carpenter from Intelguardians talk about VM Escaping and the research that they have been doing on this topic. You might also want to check out their paper in IEEE Security & Privacy magazine titled “Hiding Virtualization from Attackers and Malware.”
The course was very interesting and got me thinking about trying to prepare some lunch presentations on application security vulnerabilities. If time allows me to develop these topics, I’ll post them to this blog.
Driving up and back to Virginia Beach, plus the daily commute, provided me about 26 hours to listen to some very interesting podcasts. I’ll post links shortly to a few of the podcasts I particularly enjoyed.
During the training, I was talking to one of the students about links that provided a good source for security information. A fellow volunteer came up, provided some of his favorite links, and then thought of having a bird’s of a feather meeting. It got me thinking about my own site. I have always intended my site to be about providing links to additional resources. For example, adding the links to this post took me longer then writing the blog. I realize that some folks might not quite understand how to navigate and pull information from this site. I’ll write up a page, with graphics, pointing out areas of interest on this site. I hope it will help folks find links to additional information.
This fool has returned from his journey with many ideas and topics to blog on. While time is not always my ally, I will post as I am able.
