Shmoocon 2011

About a week from now the Shmoocon 2011 conference will be kicking off. I've managed to attend the past few Shmoocons and it's been a lot of fun. I'm a little disappointed that a couple of friends couldn't get tickets this year. They just seemed to sell out quicker this year. My friends will just have to watch the streams.

There are a lot of great talks this year, as there are every year. The ones I'm most interested in are (based on the descriptions):

• A Paranoid Schizophrenia-based Model of Data Security -  Marsh Ray
• Analytic Framework for Cyber Security -  Peiter "Mudge" Zatko
• Fun with Flow - Richard Friedberg
• INTERSECT: Combining Commercial/FOSS Tools with Custom Code to Root Out Malware  -   Matthew Pawloski and Fotios Lindiakos
• Tracking Flaws – Stream Reassembly Issues in Snort IPS -  Ashley Thomas

 My biggest hope for Shmoocon this year is NO SNOW! Last year's snow was fun, but once was enough.

I'm a slacker

I know I've been ignoring the blog, and I'd make some excuse if I had a good one. I don't, so it must be laziness. It's a new year, and a good time to change that.

Besides catching up on Chrono Trigger, I've been playing around with a few things that might lead to blog posts.

I've gotten the chance to learn a bit more about Splunk, and if I can ever stop violating my 500MB/day license (I didn't think I'd ever violate that on my home network) I hope to write something up on it. I want to specifically dig into the Splunk for OSSEC app.

DragonFly BSD is something else I've been playing with. The HAMMER file system sounded really interesting, and I wanted to give it a shot. I haven't been disappointed so far.

Finally, network flow data has interested me for a while. I wanted to dig into it a bit more so I went looking for a tool. The one I chose is Argus. There are a lot of options available in argus, but I'll post a few of the things I look at.

Here's to a good 2011!