Alright, so I am in New York City to speak at NYC BSD CON. I had to arrive a day early (Thursday) because I came directly from speaking at SECTor. It’s been a crazy week thus far.
SECTor was fun. Two of my co-workers were there, so I had some friendly company, before the conference itself go started. I took HD Moore’s “Powersploiting with Metasploit 3.2″ tutorial, which was very well put together and went in depth enough to get me interested in using it for stuff at work. Should be interesting. The conference itself was Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Tuesday, I attended several talks:
- Double Trouble: SQL Rootkits and Encryption (Kevvie Fowler)
- Metasploit Prime (HD Moore)
- More SCADA/ICS Security: Findings from the Field (Mark Fabro)
Kevvie’s talk was interesting and I’m very much interested in the forensic impact of his work with SQL server. He’s a bit of a Microsoft fan-boy, but that does not detract from the coolness of his analysis. HD’s Metasploit talk went over the new features in 3.2 of the framework and what’s ahead. Finally, Fabro’s SCADA talk is similiar to material I’ve heard, but he gives an excellent, high-energy delivery.
I missed most of the talks on Wednesday because I had to prepare my presentation, but I caught Deviant Ollam’s “Ten things everyone should know about locking & physical security.” This is a talk that he gives fairly regularly, but he keeps it up to date and is an excellent speaker. I am totally kicking myself for not visiting the “lockpick village” in the vendor expo area. Doh! Maybe next year.
My talk went well, but it was short. 45min of material done in 30… oops. Time management bit me. Oh well, the audience had good questions and they took 20 more minutes or so.
So, New York. Amazing place. We don’t have alot of subways or passenger trains in Idaho, so it’s been a bit of adventure learning how to navigate the city. I managed to use the train/subway system to get from JFK to my hotel near Columbia University: $7 and 1.5 hours (not bad). I grabbed some Indian food (something we desperately lack in Idaho) on about 100th and Broadway, and then called it an early evening.
Thursday I spent the morning in the fashion district (and navigating the subway system). My wife (and I) are addicted to Project Runway, and I visited Parsons New School of (fill in the blank) in the 7th Ave/14th St area. I then took a walk through Mood Fabrics. Wow, I’m pretty well convinced that if you can’t find it at Mood, it doesn’t exist.
I had an interesting thing happen several times during the day. About 5 times, men dressed in black hats and sporting beards (what I associate with orthodox Jewish) came up to me and asked “Are you Jewish?” I replied, “No,” because, well, I’m not. Each time after responding, the man would just mutter, “OK” or “Thank you” and then walk away. I enquired about this behavior and was told it was recruiting. This struck me odd… “Are you?” “No” “Ok, bye” doesn’t seem like a way to bring in recruits. Turns out, no, or well, sorta. It’s recruiting those partially in the “in” crowd (Jewish) to join in the festivities more actively (or so I was told). And no, I don’t really feel left out.
Back to the hotel to do laundry then back out to the Havana Central on Broadway for dinner with the NCYBSDCON crowd. Ya know, this is perhaps my favorite conference. It’s small, but the people area great and the audience is really receptive. I’m up at 10am tomorrow. Look for the audio and slides to appear on the NYCBSDCON website (2006 is there and you can hear my talk on OpenBSD/sparc64 from there).
Pictures are up from the trip so far on flickr.