DefCon Wrapup

I'm parked waiting for the red-eye back east, and reflecting on how international DefCon has become. I spent some time in the Chill-Out room with a managed-security guy from Tokyo, and discovered that he had come out just for the three-day DefCon event. Interesting on several levels: That he felt it worth it to him to fly ten hours for a weekend, and that the price for Black Hat was still high enough to discourage him from staying two extra days for the briefings.

While I'm missing the last day of DefCon, I was pleased with most of the sessions that I attended. The staffers can certainly still work on crowd flow and management, but that's going to always be a problem with 7000+ attendees. This would be a great opportunity for a local university to lend a hand with a student project (Industrial Engineering?)

Black Hat Training - TCP/IP Weapons School

The training sessions here at Black Hat in Las Vegas finished yesterday. I took Richard Bejtlich's TCP/IP Weapons School, which examines in some detail HOW certain vulnerabilities are exploited at layers 2-7 of the OSI model. It was a two-day class, but I could have done with another day. Diving deep was left as an exercise for the student (grin).